When Popeye the Sailor Man has an important message for the kids in his audience, he can be very hard to ignore!
Witness this moment from POPEYE # 110 (Charlton Comics, Cover Date: October, 1971) - first seen in its entire original page composition, followed by individual panels for great ease of reading!
It seems that mad inventor O.G. Wotasnozzle has invented a hair restoring formula...
...And Li'l Swee'pea, not knowing what it is, goes for a taste!
So concerned is Popeye that he INTERRUPTS the story flow (as if he were doing a "cut-away" gag from FAMILY GUY) to give us his warning!
Next panel, the story resumes...
For what it's worth, I actually LIKE that!
It says something important (VERY IMPORTANT) - but, because it's said in THE UNIQUE WAY THAT POPEYE WOULD SAY IT, it doesn't feel like the heavy-handed... um, "guidance" that would come to dominate the cartoons of the '70s and '80s!
It's just POPEYE, giving his readers this warning "as himself" and, because it's so brilliantly confined within a single panel, it doesn't even take you out of the story!
I'm not always very kind in my writings about Charlton Comics at this Blog and, unfortunately, those low opinions are (far more often than not) well deserved! But, in this case, they really pulled-off something great, and must be commended for such originality and deftness of execution!
POPEYE # 110
Then again, POPEYE may have been the best-handled of any of the titles once published under the Dell and Gold Key banners that eventually found its way to Charlton!
On an odd but related note, POPEYE 110 also contained a "Non-Popeye" one-page gag that not only involved the ingestion of strange physically-altering substances, but echoes the ultra-classic Tex Avery cartoon "King Size Canary" as well!
Here it is! Click to enlarge! But, you can get the gist, even at this size!
Tch! Tch! Perhaps Popeye should have interrupted THIS story too!
Let's all sing:
"When yer take sumpthin' unknown...
You'll retch, groan, an' moan...
Sez Popeye th' Sailor Man!
Toot! Toot!
8 comments:
The most amazing thing about that bizarre cat-and-rat situation is that it's drawn in a grimly "realist" style, with the toughened-up versions of the rat and cat looking reminiscent of Walt Kelly's darkest Red Scare political-parody characters.
Why do I think they'd "run out of the stuff" much sooner?
And what size are those home furnishings behind the characters?
David:
As we both know, Western Publishing’s Dell, Gold Key, and Whitman comics had more than their share of “oddities and outright mysteries”, for which we will never have explanations or answers.
But, those “oddities and mysteries” pale when compared to the unfathomable workings of Charlton!
Random gags – mostly of the “one-page variety”, but sometimes as long as four pages – that were in no way connected to the title character of the comic, or any “other creation” of the home-studio of said character, would “simply appear” in Charlton Comics!
Imagine, for instance, if there was a completely unrelated one-page gag about some (oh, say…) “generic mule character” in one of Carl Barks’ issues of UNCLE SCROOGE and you get the picture!
Many, but certainly not *all* by any stretch, of these gags were done by a cartoonist named Phil Mendez, whose work I described as “Jack Manning on Acid”! Funny thing is that, from me, that is actually a COMPLEMENT directed toward Mr. Mendez!
He did some marvelously stretched and distorted funny animal work in these pages and, unlike Ray Dirgo, his (unfortunately rare, when stacked up against the output of Mr. Dirgo) Charlton Hanna-Barbera stuff was at least fun to look at – though totally bizarre by Western Publishing’s standards, to which I had been accustomed my then-entire life!
Phil Mendez actually has TWO such one-page gags in this issue of POPEYE – but the gag in question with its “grimly ‘realist’ style” (as you so accurately put it) is decidedly not one of them! I have no idea who the artist might be.
Even Grand Comics Database, my go-to source for information like this, does not credit this particular gag in its listing for the issue!
I’d say the home furnishings are “normal size”, as the giantized rat can sit comfortably at the table and wolf (sorry, wrong animal) down “The Stuff” – and the giantized cat dwarfs the table and must hunch-over to even fit within the confines of the final panel!
No matter, it’s delightfully oddball stuff!
Strange though these incursions by random one-page one-shots may seem, I can't help but feel that they're not that far removed from what you could get in most "anthology comics" of the time — be they WDC&S or, say, the Walter Lantz New Funnies. It doesn't look that way to us, obviously; but to a casual reader who didn't have the entire farm of characters of a given studio in mind, a story about "Bongo Bear" or a "Little Hiawatha" one-pager sandwiched between the Mickey and Donald tales they expected from such a book mustn't have felt too different from what you describe.
My thesis, in short, is that Chartlon Comics (perhaps faced with a lack of the workable preexisting characters that Disney could just crib from its Silly Symphonies and feature films as needed?) was just simulating a rich wealth of characters ex-nihilo for an end result that wouldn't have looked much different to someone just reading the comics without knowledge of their respective backgrounds.
If that's what they were doing — even unconsciously — then isn't that an extremely interesting experiment? T
If I may digress, I can tell you that two foremost Franco-Belgian authors performed such an experiment entirely on purpose a few years back, creating between the two of them three full issues of a fictional anthology comic-book ("Rik Spoutnik Magazine") every bit in the mould of Pilote, Spirou and Tintin (the foremost weekly French anthology comic books). And the illusion was stunning; were I less savvy of comic history, if I'd picked up a softcover Rik Spoutnik at a newsstand one day, I wouldn't have guessed for a moment that it wasn't an anthology comic with ten different authors and a history spanning decades (there are "reprints" of older strips, done in an archaic style; a "letter" from a "long-time reader" demands the "return" of an unseen hero whose adventures have supposedly been on hiatus for a few years).
Achille:
Oh, it IS “an extremely interesting experiment” indeed!
And, if there’s one thing I can honestly say about Charlton, it’s that (for better or for worse) they weren’t afraid to experiment.
I agree with your entire first paragraph, save one thing… the one-pager examples you cite would have said “Walt Disney’s Bongo Bear” or “Walt Disney’s Little Hiawatha”, thus giving a sense that these characters belong to some “greater whole”.
There is no sense of these odd characters “belonging to the world of Popeye”, or the studio responsible for him. A BUGS BUNNY issue may have a “Tweety and Sylvester” backup, or a TOM AND JERRY issue may have a “Spike and Tyke” backup – but you get the feeling that these characters “belong” if, for no other reason than “similar design”.
The Dell and Gold Key issues of POPEYE ran stories of the inventor O.G. Wottasnozzle – and so did Charlton, as seen in this post. But, OGW also came out of the old E.C. Segar comics, and even made an appearance in one of the 1960s King Features-produced Popeye cartoons. And, whether drawn by Segar, Bud Sagendorf, or even George Wildman, his design esthetic was the same as Popeye’s, giving the reader a sense that “he fits”!
These gags, be they by Phil Mendez, the unknown artist David describes as having a “grimly ‘realist’ style”, or any other such artist having no history or other connection with Popeye, just LOOK like they “don’t belong”!
Charlton also occasionaly dropped shorter stories or one-page gags into its POPEYE title featuring other King Features comic strip characters, such as “Snuffy Smith” and “Hi and Lois”… but, at least to me, the particular gag in question feels more like merely “using inventory”!
But, in this case, said “inventory” was used to good – and bizarrely humorous – advantage!
The example you describe in your last paragraph REALLY sounds like a grand experiment. VERY CLEVER indeed!
The only thing I can think of that might come close to that in the States would be the RADIOACTIVE MAN (Simpsons-related) title from Bongo Comics. There, an entire fictionalized run of RADIOACTIVE MAN comics was implied. There were Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Modern Age – and even a “Gold Key Adventure Style” issue with a characteristically painted cover!
In their letter columns, I would actually refer to “back issues of RADIOACTIVE MAN” that were completely of my own imagination – in keeping with the spirit of the book! It was great stuff, but I suspect it was too far removed from THE SIMPSONS itself to last very long! Alas!
Popeye would later do lots of PSA's on The All-New Popeye Hour in 1978-81:https://youtu.be/ypsDYzSyg84 and this one: https://youtu.be/z-TiScrwawc . But I think you get the point after just two. They weren't part of the story like the one you showed us is, though.
Forgive the correction from this diehard English teacher, but the Popeye lyric that you created should read, "You'll retch, moan, and groan." The "wretch" that you were "reaching" for is "retch." Just wanted to "retch" out to you with this correction...and a terrible pun to boot!
Deb:
It just occurred to me that the (ACK!) "All New Popeye Hour" coincided with the Whitman run of POPEYE comics - the last gasp of the original continuum that began with Dell, and passed through Gold Key and Charlton! You can see that HERE!
Also WAY too many cartoons of the period moralized at their underestimated audience - but this was special because it just hit you completely out of nowhere! And WAS in character for Popeye to do so!
Scarecrow:
When you’re “wright”, you’re “wright”, concerning “wretch”!
I will “wrectify” this immediately!
“Wreally” appreciate it! :-)
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