| Thimble Theatre | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | E. C. Segar |
| Launch date | December 19, 1919 |
| Syndicate(s) | King Features Syndicate |
Thimble Theatre is a comic strip created by American cartoonist E. C. Segar in 1919. The superstrong, one-eyed sailor Popeye is the best known of its large cast of characters.
The strip debuted as The Thimble Theatre in the New York Journal on December 19, 1919. It began as a gag strip featuring Olive Oyl and her boyfriend Ham Gravy. The duo became a trio with the introduction of Olive's brother Castor Oyl, and by the mid-1920s Thimble Theatre became a character-focused adventure-comedy continuity strip. In the midst of an overseas adventure, the protagonists hired a sailor named Popeye, a minor character who soon came to dominate the strip. In 1931 the strip was billed Thimble Theatre ... Starring Popeye, and Popeye from the 1970s.
Background edit
Chester, Illinois-born E. C. Segar joined the entertainement industry at 12 when he began working at the Chester Opera House drawing advertisements and playing accompanying music on the drums to the films shown there. After completing an 18-month correspondence cartooning course with W. L. Evans he moved to Chicago and found cartooning work with the Chicago Tribune. His first strip was Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers, featuring Chaplin's Little Tramp film persona.[1]
Ed Wheelan produced a strip for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers called Midget Movies which mocked popular films. When Wheelan quit the Hearst empire and took his strip with him, the newly-hired Segar was anointed with the task of producing a similar strip: Thimble Theatre.[2]
Thimble Theatre appeared as radio and other media were about to deflate the daily newspaper's importantance in daily life. In the early 20th century, entertainment was as much a part of the nespaper as the news, reaching a peak in the mid-1930s. The comic strip was one of the prime attractions of a newspaper to readers, and genres proliferated outside of the traditional humor with which they first rose to prominence—adventure, fantasy, drama, domestic situations, and science fiction had their places on the comics page.[3]
Publication edit
Thimble Theatre was Segar's third published strip[citation needed] when it first appeared in the New York Journal on December 19, 1919. The paper's owner William Randolph Hearst[4] also owned King Features Syndicate, which syndicated the strip.[citation needed] It did not attract a large audience at first, and at the end of its first decade appeared in only half a dozen newspapers.[5]
History edit
The strip debuted as The Thimble Theatre and starred the innocent heroine Olive Oyl, her boyfriend Harold Hamgravy (soon after simply Ham Gravy), and the villainous Willy Wormwood as actors who took on the roles of the characters in each episode's film spoof.[6] Before long Segar introduced Olive's foolish, materialstic, and ambitious brother Castor Oyl, who quickly became the focus of the strip. While the gag-a-day format continued, stories began to develop continuity from day to day as the plot followed the development of Castor's schemes.[7]
As the 1920s unfurled the stories grew longer. At the end of the decade, Castor, now the possessor of a magical wish-granting Whiffle Hen, hires a boat to take him and his comrades to Dice Island where he plans to use the hen's powers to cheat the island's gamblers. To manage the boat Castor hires a superstrong one-eyed pipe-smoking sailor named Popeye, who makes his debut on January 17, 1929.[8] Popeye talked with his fists and, as he moved from background character to main attraction, his character evolved from mere roughneck sailor to almost superhuman.[9]
Segar blended genres in the strip—to the comedy he added adventure, suspense, satire, and fantasy.[3]
Popeye edit
Popeye's popularity led to his name being tagged to the strip title in 1931: Thimble Theatre ... Starring Popeye.[10]
Diagnosed with leukemia in 1937 Segar found the work of producing Thimble Theatre increasingly difficult. Ghost artists assisted in producing the strip as his health failed.[11] First was Doc Winner (1885–1956), who continued into 1939 with the daily and into 1940 with the Sunday strip.[12] He was joined occasionally by Joe Musial (1905–1977), who had done comic book covers and other Popeye-related work.[13] Segar had taken off most of early 1938, returning for the "King Swee'pea" storyline that began May 23. This was to be his last—his final printed daily ran August 27 and his final Sunday October 2. Segar died October 13, 1938, at age 43. Winner continued the "King Swee'pea" story, which ran for a year and a half in all.[14]
After Segar edit
Bela Zaboly took over drawing the daily strip in mid-1939, with scripts by Tom Sims. Zaboly imitated Segar's art style, but made changes: Swee'pea was given a sailor's uniform and began to walk, a version that Grandinetti states fans preferred.[15] Ralph Stein took on scripting the daily from 1955 to 1958. He had a British big-game hunter named Sir Pomeroy accompany Popeye on globetrotting and interstellar adventures, and brought Bluto back to the strip.[16]
Segar's sister introduced her brother to a young Bob Sagendorf when she met him at the art supply store Segar frequented. Segar inveited Sagendorf to assist on Thimble Theatre for three weeks so Segar could take a vacation; Segar thereafter retained Sagendorf as an assistant. When Segar died in 1938, King Features considered Sagendorf too young to carry on the strip. He assisted from time to time, and produced Popeye comic books, from 1946 under his own name. In 1958 King Features chose him to draw both the daily and Sunday Thimble Theatre, work which began to see print in 1959.[17]
Early Sagendorf strips adhered to a Segar-inspired style; soon he made changes, expanding the cast of characters, giving Popeye a more prominent chin and a smaller sailor's cap, moving Olive Oyl's nose further up her face, giving the Sea Hag a face similar to Popeye's, and changing Bluto's name to Brutus à la the animated series. Sagendorf retired from the daily strip in 1986, continuing with the Sundays until his death in 1994.[18]
Underground cartoonist Bobby London took over the daily from Sagendorf, and brought the strip up to date with topical subjects such as pop idols, anorexia, and the Middle East. He brought Castor Oyl back to the strip, and reintroduced continuity to the stories, a rare approach to making comic strips by the 1980s. King Features fired London in 1992 over a storyline entitled "Witch Hunt" involving the right to choose, citing that such a them was inappropriate for a family-oriented strip. There was a plethora of media coverage when London revealed the reason for his termination.[19]
Since 1994, the Sunday has been done by Hy Eisman, a cartoonist talented in imitating other cartoonists' styles; he also handles The Katzenjammer Kids, the longest-running newspaper comic strip. New daily strips ceased in 1994, King Features instead opting to reprint old Sagendorf dailies.[20]
Characters edit
Reception and legacy edit
Since Segar's death, the public has come to know the Thimble Theatre cast best through the animated Popeye cartoons.[1]
Segar aimed the strip at an adult audience; following his death, his successors took it in a more innocent, family-oriented direction.[22]
Reprints of Segar's strips, and later Sims and Zaboly's, appeared in comic books put out by King Features such as King Comics and Magic Comics, as well as in Dell Comics' Four Color. Original material appeared in Popeye beginning in 1948, originally from Dell and later from Gold Key, King, Charlton, and Whitman.[20]
Popeye has been the subject of a number of parodies in Mad. The first was "Poopeye" in the early 1950s—drawn in the style of the Thimble Theatre strip, the storyline has Swee'pea, as "Swee'back", hiring characters from other strips to attack "Poopeye".[23]
A Woody Gelman-edited collection of strips from 1936–37 called Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye the Sailor (1971) served as the basis for a live-action film Popeye (1980) directed by Robert Altman and scripted by cartoonist Jules Feiffer.[24]
Bob Sagendorf wrote a history of the strip called Popeye: The First Fifty Years which downplayed the animated versions and the work of cartoonists other than himself and Segar.[18]
To comics historian R. C. Harvey Segar's accomplishment was not in establishing an art style for other cartoonists to imitate but in demonstrating the narrative possibilities of the comics medium.[25]
Notes edit
References edit
- ^ a b Grandinetti 2004, p. 2.
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 161.
- ^ a b Harvey 1994, p. 160.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, p. 3.
- ^ Coletta 2014, p. 300.
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 162.
- ^ Harvey 1994, pp. 162–163.
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 163.
- ^ Harvey 1994, pp. 163–164.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, p. 5.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, p. 6.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 7, 9.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 6, 10.
- ^ Thompson 2012, p. 74.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 10, 12.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, p. 13.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 14–16.
- ^ a b Grandinetti 2004, pp. 15–16.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 16–18.
- ^ a b Grandinetti 2004, pp. 18–20.
- ^ Marschall 2012a, p. 5.
- ^ Inge 1986, p. 172.
- ^ Grandinetti 2004, pp. 24–27.
- ^ Jamieson 2010, p. 125–126.
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 159.
Works cited edit
- Blackbeard, Bill (2006). "Black Laughter". In Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 1. Fantagraphics Books. pp. 5–7. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
Coletta, Charles (2014). "Popeye". In Booker, M. Keith (ed.). Comics through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas [4 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. pp. 299–301. ISBN 978-0-313-39751-6.
- Grandinetti, Fred M. (2004). Popeye: An Illustrated Cultural History (2nd ed.). McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-2687-4.
- Harvey, Robert C. (1994). The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-612-5.
Inge, Thomas (1986). "Faulkner Reads the Funny Papers". Faulkner and Humor. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 153–191. ISBN 978-1-61703-384-1.
- Jamieson, Dave (2010). Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. Grove/Atlantic. ISBN 978-0-8021-9715-3.
- Marschall, Richard (2012). "The Continuity Style of E. C. Segar". In Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 6. Fantagraphics Books. pp. 3–6. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Marschall, Richard (2012). "Licensing and Merchandising Move to Center Stage of the Thimble Theatre: Popeye Fisks his Way into American Culture". In Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 6. Fantagraphics Books. pp. 181–184. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim, ed. (2012). Popeye. Vol. 6. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 2. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 3. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 4. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 5. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.
- Thompson, Kim (ed.). Popeye. Vol. 6. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-1-56097-779-7.