The Wedding of Popeye and Olive

Originally published February 26, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1319

I don’t make a habit of discussing projects I’m working on in this column, but I’m involved with two projects that are off beat, even for me… so you know that it’s gotta be pretty offbeat. So I thought that I’d take this opportunity to tell you about them.

The first is a project that’s got not only the attention of the national media, but even Tony Isabella itself… so you know that it’s got to be a quality endeavor. I am speaking of The Wedding of Popeye and Olive, a one-shot that I wrote for Ocean Comics.

Fans have been asking me how in the world I got involved in writing such a title. The answer is shockingly simple: Bob Palin of Ocean Comics asked me to. But it was certainly a bit of a bumpy road from first blush to final product (which should be out within a couple of weeks.)

I am fully aware that fans do not speak with one massive unimind, and therefore consistency is not really a possibility. Still, there is one contingent which asks me why it seems I’m content to stick with only the major publishers and never get involved with smaller indy publishers (those folks being unaware that I co-write a series called Soulsearchers & Company for Claypool Press.) By the same token, if a project for a small indy is announced with my name on it, fans scratch their heads and wonder why I would get involved.

Well, indys don’t get much smaller than Ocean. Bob, as near as I can tell, constitutes the entirety of Ocean’s staff (making the tiny early staff of Marvel, back in the Stan Lee/Solly Brodsky/Fabulous Flo Steinberg days seem positively luxurious by comparison). Bob called me some months ago and told me that he had gotten a license from King Features to do the above-mentioned one-shot. Would I be interested, he asked, in signing on.

To say this would be a labor of love would be to understate it, because it sure weren’t for the money. No one’s getting rich off this puppy… certainly not me. Thus far the entirety of my take for the 25 page book is enough to buy groceries for maybe a day. Basically, I was working for free (or even at a loss if one considers an hour of my time worth a specific amount of money.) Nonetheless, I didn’t want to miss out. If nothing else, I was certain that–presuming the book went ahead–I’d wind up seeing mentions of it on news shows and such (particularly if it was a slow news day) and (knowing me) I’d wind up gnashing my teeth rather fiercely. With the possible exception of the Marvel/DC crossover, I’ve never really written anything that got any sort of national attention. I felt it would be kind of cool to be responsible for a story that I was certain would get tongues wagging. After all, Popeye is still a cultural icon to many, and the news of his marriage was certain to garner news interest.

I also saw it as a singular opportunity to try my best to revive–at least for a little while–Popeye as he was, rather than what he’s devolved into. I’m certainly glad I went in that direction because most folks have no idea of Popeye’s true supporting cast. When The Daily Show on Comedy Central recently featured a news item about the comic, the biggest laugh came in reaction to something that wasn’t a joke: Jon Stewart made mention of Olive Oyl’s brother, Castor Oyl (with accompanying illustration on the screen behind him.) That got a huge laugh, as if the Daily Show‘s writers had come up with the character for the purpose of the bit, rather than Castor’s having been created more than seven decades ago. Granted the entire cast and crew graces the Robert Altman Popeye film, but despite brilliant performances by Robin Williams and Shelly Duval, unfortunately that film didn’t do a great deal to educate the public (if nothing else, those insufferable and bizarre songs drove people screaming from the theatre.)

My first exposure to Popeye was doubtless the same as yours: the cartoons. Brilliant as many of them were, particularly the very early ones, the vast majority of them were simple and formulaic: Popeye would either “first encounter” Olive Oyl or else they would already be a couple, and then Bluto would happen along and catch Olive’s interest. Eventually, however, Bluto’s advances would become too noxious, at which point Olive would bellow for help. Popeye would slug it out with Bluto, get trounced, eat the spinach, kick the crap out of Bluto, and that would be that.

I didn’t have the slightest idea that there was more to Popeye than that until, as a teen, I read Bill Blackbeard’s brilliant essay on the sailor’s origins, “Popeye, the First *arf arf* Superhero of Them All,” in the thoroughly educational collection of comic-related essays, All In Color For a Dime (now available through Krause, arf arf). In those pages, Blackbeard chronicled Popeye’s early days in E.C. Segar’s legendary Thimble Theatre strip. That was the first time I read of the strip’s existence before Popeye was introduced, its early focus on the (mis)adventures of Castor Oyl, and his associate Ham Gravy. Popeye wasn’t introduced until a number of years into the strip, when Castor—seeking the services of a swab–encounters our future hero on a pier and demands to know if he’s a sailor.

Clearly clad in sailor-esque garments, Popeye sarcastically utters his first words, “’Ja think I’m a cowboy?” It’s a phrase that I took care to include in the comic.

From that unprepossessing start, Popeye rose in popularity and stature, wound up taking over the strip, and driving Ham Gravy out of it for good. But the strip still contained a plethroa of other characters, including the future-casting creature, Eugene the Jeep, Olive’s parents, Nana and Cole Oyl, Alice the Goon, Swee’pea, Poopdeck Pappy (Popeye’s reprobate father who was introduced specifically to be a reprobate as Popeye was given more of a moral center due to the increased focus on him), the dreaded Sea Hag, and probably the best known supporting character, the burger-mooching J. Wellington Wimpy. Bluto (a.k.a. Brutus) was a fairly minor muscleman; however, he was the villain who happened to be in the strip at the time that the cartoons were being developed, and so it was he who was immortalized into cinematic history. Some of the other characters popped up here and there for a cartoon or two, but by and large it was just Popeye, Bluto and Olive, and that was that. In the intervening years, the strip shrunk in popularity and circulation. Nowadays only a bare handful of papers carry the Popeye strip which consists of a simple, standard, gag strip, rather than anything remotely akin to the vast, sprawling, epic that Segar crafted.

It’s unfortunate and limiting, not remotely doing justice to Segar’s vision. So when I embarked on doing the wedding issue, I was determined to try and do something about it. I’m not remotely in Segar’s league, but I felt the very least I could do was try and give readers at least a remote flavor of what Thimble Theatre was all about. Characters who haven’t seen the light of day in half a century trot through the pages of Wedding, which not only features the return of Ham Gravy, but the magical Wiffle Hen, whose mysterious powers are actually the thing that gave Popeye his edge seventy years ago (rather than spinach.) Still, I knew that generations who grew up on the cartoons were going to be reading the book (at least theoretically) and there was going to have to be some aspect of that present.

And so I had the plot turn upon a notion that had always bugged me, even as a kid:

Why the hëll didn’t Bluto ever eat any of the spinach?

After all, he was presented as more than Popeye’s equal when they were one-on-one. It was only upon Popeye’s downing the spinach that he gained superiority. But if Bluto ate the spinach as well, then arguably he should be able to pound our hero into the middle of next week.

Basically, I tried to merge in my plot the sensibilities of the cartoon with the cast and concepts of Thimble Theatre. The only snag came when Ocean Comics sent the plot to King Features for approval. The response from King Features kind of floored us. They said to Bob, “It reads very well, but we want you to make one small change: You can’t have Popeye and Olive get married.”

That presented a twofold problem. First, the plot hinged on the wedding, because Popeye is spurred onto the matrimonial trail by Eugene the Jeep’s predicting that he and Olive are going to get hitched within 24 hours. Since the Jeep is never wrong (unless June Bugs are around, but we won’t go into that), Popeye immediately leaps into action to make sure the prognostication is carried out, i.e., it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they didn’t really get married, the whole story falls apart.

The second problem was pure audience expectation: If you publish a book with that title and then they don’t get married, the readership is gonna get kind of honked. I had absolutely no intention of doing a rewrite that was going to cheat buyers of the book. Nor did Bob have any desire to publish the book if it wasn’t going to live up to its name. You could get away with it, I suppose, if it were one storyline in an ongoing comic book series. But this was a one-shot, and to back out on the last pages would have been a cheat.

Furthermore, considering that there was a cartoon series some years back called Popeye and Son which featured the sailor married and with a young son, the character’s own continuity indicated that at some point Olive and he must have gotten married. So it was odd that a comic book which was going to have a fraction of the audience that the TV show had was making King Features weak in the knees. They wound up coming around after Bob went mano-a-mano with them, but it was touch and go for a while.

Dave Garcia did a wonderful job carrying off the story, which I hope will both interest and educate Popeye novices and also satisfy long-time Popeye purists. Naturally, you all are the final arbiters of whether I carried it off or not.

Okay. That’s the first project I’m involved with that’s a bit offbeat. The second is this: I’ve finally gotten around to participating in something that I’ve always wanted to do: community theatre.

One of the best theaters on Long Island is the Broadhollow Theater, and I recently auditioned for—and got into—a production of what is probably my favorite musical of all time, 1776. Detailing John Adams’ endeavors to unite a fractured congress and march them unanimously toward independence, it’s got a wonderful score and probably the best book ever written for the musical stage, ever.

I have maybe a handful of lines, but considering my relative lack of stage experience, they’d have been insane to put me in anything major. Besides, I get to speak with a Scots brogue and carry a musket around, so I’m a happy camper.

The only mild downside is that, for whatever reason, the costumers decided that I, among all of congress, shouldn’t wear a wig. Figures. It’s the 18th century, the time when male wigs were in bloom, and I still don’t have hair. On the other hand, I suspect I’ll sweat a lot less.

I fully admit that I’m not in a position to be unbiased, but I think we have a great cast, and that comes from someone who’s seen four different productions of the show, including the recent revival of Broadway (not to mention owning the laserdisc with the uncut version of the film.)

Go see it if you can. If nothing else, as Ben Stein says: You might learn something.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)