Ahoy there, matey... and all th' li'l mates out there! How'd ja like ta ask a quest-ting of POPEYE TH' SAILOR MAN... an' have that George Wildman swab from Charlton Comics answer ya back?
Well, that's ex-act-lee what yer gonter get in th' pages o' POPEYE # 111 (Charlton Comics, Cover Date: December, 1971)!
You know, I was wondering... just the other day... how old li'l Swee'pea would have been in 1971!
...And, as if George Wildman could read my mind...
Checking my hardcover "E.C. Segar's Popeye Volume 3 Let's You and Him Fight!" - a superb book in a superb series, I might add - and darned if old Mister Wildman was RIGHT!
The first image of Swee'pea ever seen was in the JULY 28, 1933 strip - on Page 71 of the Fantagraphics volume!
Though technically, he arrived bundled-up in a package, and that package first appeared in the JULY 24th strip - along with Swee'pea's FIRST SOUNDS, emanating from within the box!
In fact, only a few months earlier, I had just learned the name of Carl Barks in THIS BOOK!
And nuggets of information on comics, animation, TV, and film were few and very far between - so I really commend Mr. Wildman for putting out ANYTHING of the sort.
After all, in 1971, I certainly didn't know when (or even HOW) Swee'pea first appeared, and I WANTED to know stuff like that!
Wildman did a few more of these pages over other issues. Although he most likely wrote all the questions himself, and drew upon whatever knowledge he possessed or was able to obtain from King Features, these pages were entertaining (in a light-weight sorta way) and informative... ESPECIALLY FOR 1971!
Charlton's POPEYE and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO comics were very often a cut (often a HUGE CUT) above the um... "lesser" product we normally associate with Charlton, and something like this - particularly at a time such a thing was NEEDED - is just one more reason why!
Bonus George Wildman Feature: Check out this self-deprecating illustration of a photo of George Wildman, surrounded by the POPEYE family of characters who comment on it!
Gotta love the reference to classic Popeye comic strip and comic book artist Bud Sagendorf, who was certainly very much alive and active at the time - and may very well have seen this!
I suppose SOMETHING could be read into the notion that it is POPEYE who heartily approves of Wildman assuming the artistic and editorial reins of the comic, while it is BRUTUS who supports the prior regime!
But, hey... OLIVE is right! George Wildman certainly deserves our respect for "trying", and largely succeeding, with such an iconic and storied character as Popeye, while working at a second-tier publisher like Charlton - and in the generally mundane (...when compared with the prior "Golden and Silver Ages") 1970s, no less!
...Hooray for him!
8 comments:
I haven’t seen much of George Wildman’s Popeye (That I know of), but judging from what I have seen, he had a style that is very lively and fun to look at, even if it doesn’t look like E.C. Segar’s work at all (the animated Popeye certainly went very far away from the comic strips too, and most of them are still fun).
Deb:
I absolutely agree that George Wildman’s Popeye had “…a style that is very lively and fun to look at”! As someone who, to the point that his work began appearing in comic books, was exclusively born and raised on Bud Sagendorf – in both comic books and newspaper strips – his stuff looked rather different at first. But, I soon began to embrace it for what it was!
George Wildman’s Popeye began to “transition” from Bud Sagendorf’s at Charlton, after during the brief run of “KING COMICS” - King Features own attempt to “take their licensed properties in-house, and publish its own line of comics”, not unlike what Disney had done in 1990. King’s issues were sandwiched in between far longer, and better remembered, runs by Gold Key (1962-1966) and Charlton (1969-1977).
King, as did its predecessors Dell and Gold Key, published Sagendorf, but with a smattering of Italian Popeye reprints… you know, the kind *I* would give anything to translate and dialogue for American publication!
The King Comics Popeye run was quite good, with its first issue “not missing a beat” in its transition from Gold Key! Indeed, publisher’s logo aside, it was virtually indistinguishable from its Gold Key predecessors – as you can see HERE for Gold Key, and HERE for King!
Charlton’s transition from King also went for a similar look and feel using Sagendorf covers and some interiors – but George Wildman was there, putting his stamp on things from the first Charlton issue!
As Sagendorf slowly but steadily turned his attentions away from comic books, his last published comic book work was a 13 page story in Charlton’s Issue # 100 (released in December, 1969), Wildman made the series his own – always energetic and stylized, it became especially good once he teamed with writer Nick Cuti, starting with # 114 (1972), for what would be the 1970s equivalent of a “Thimble Theatre” run!
You can see the Charlton run’s transition from early Sagendorf covered-issues, to Wildman getting his (pardon) “sea-legs” with long time Charlton writer Joe Gill, to really being “piped-aboard” (pardon again) with the more “Thimble Theatre-esque” issues with Nick Cuti HERE!
Wildman was successful enough to become the series artist when the POPEYE title returned to Gold Key and Whitman in 1977! If you can stand yet another link, that run is seen HERE, with some 1950s Sagendorf reprints scattered throughout.
I don’t know how long George Wildman remained active, but (believe it or not) he did art for at least the first two issues of DC’s ANIMANIACS title in 1995!
Now, that I’ve digressed into a lengthy history lesson, from which you all may very well need a dose of spinach to recover, I’d like to say to Deb that I’m glad you enjoy Wildman’s work on Popeye and that I have at least two “stored-up” posts that will illustrate how creative he could be. They will come, as with all things, in due time!
Swee'Pea seems to have a rather confusing life in animation, where he often lives with Olive Oyl (especially in the Max Fleischer cartoons), but other times he lives with Popeye (especially in the KFS TV shorts). Sometimes Swee'Pea doesn't talk, and other times he does (especially in Bud Sagendorf's stories and in the Jack Kinney TV cartoons). Swee'Pea is a wildly inconsistent character.
Deb:
You’re quite right! Swee’pea may be one of the inconsistently characterized entities in animation!
Though, I feel that Segar, and his assistant and eventual successor Sagendorf, kept him sufficiently consistent. George Wildman also continued that at Charlton. Again, especially once Nick Cuti became his writer most everything was derived from comics past!
Conversely, in the Fleischer and Famous Studios cartoons, when he appeared at all, he bounced around between Olive and Popeye! Oddly, it was the unfairly maligned King Features TV cartoons that “got him right” more often than any other! Those, too, also hewed closer to the comics than any other animated versions, as my link details.
But, all this is exactly what makes Popeye the Sailor such a fascinating character of both comics and animation – and for much closer to a CENTURY than his creator E.C. Segar could ever have imagined!
I have that set and a 75th anniversary DVD set from another company. Not all of these cartoons are fantastic, but as a whole, the 1960-61 series is quite interesting. Because of how many different studios worked on those 220 cartoons, the quality and consistency of them is all over the place! You can see all of them on Amazon Prime, and KFS is slowly putting them out on YouTube on the official Popeye channel there. They’re kind of fun (and often head-shakingly weird in the case of the Jack Kinney shorts!).
More so than the Jack Kinney shorts, which certainly were weird, the “Gerald Ray Studio” shorts were even MORE enjoyably weird!
Those would be the LAST NINE shorts on the Warner Archive set that would otherwise appear to be the complete Paramount TV Popeyes! They had a delightfully cheesy early 1960s vibe to them in visuals, stock scores, and stock sound effects!
There were actually TEN Gerald Ray shorts in all – but I have a feeling that “Egypt Us” was probably left-off for the usual reasons that individual shorts are otherwise inexplicably left out of such collections.
But “Egypt Us” is included in that “other set” you mention, so at least I got to see it that way! Nice to know all of them are available via streaming…. Even “Egypt Us”, I wonder?
Yes, Egypt Us is there on Amazon Prime, as well as all of the weird Gene Deitch Popeye cartoons as well. Two of Deitch’s shorts “Canine Caprice” and “Roger” feature a talking dog in stories that make me think of Bill Walsh’s short talking dog story from the 1940’s Gottfredson Mickey Mouse newspaper strip (but of course, done in a way that the stories fit Popeye).
Yep! If there’s one thing you’ve gotta give to the King Features TV Popeye shorts, besides a greater adherence to Segar and Sagendorf than anything done by Famous Studios, it’s their great imagination!
Sure, there were some that were SOOO “By-The-Numbers” that, if you heard the soundtrack without seeing the animation, you could very well mistake them for Famous Studios theatrical shorts, but so many of them really went to such unusual places that (…let’s bring it all Full Circle) they were the “Charlton Popeye comics” of animation!
…They didn’t look as good as Segar/Sagendorf, but were often wonderfully weird in their own right! You’ll see some examples of this by George Wildman in future posts!
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