The Weekly Weird. In 1894, Puck magazine took aim at the rising influence of increasingly sensational and less costly city newspapers. Here, Frederick Burr Opper, who would go on to be one of newspaper comics’ founding fathers, called out Joseph Pulitzer in particular as a purveyor of “fake news.” More on the full cartoon here.
Force-fed a new brand of cereal by his kidnappers that grows hair uncontrollably, Cecil Jensen’s country rube Elmo is awash in a pool of his own tresses. More on this strange late 1940s satire here.
Do we really want to psychoanalyze Popeye? Sure, his anger management is pretty clear. His tendency to resolve all disagreements with a sock in the jaw is often considered a feature, not a bug. But why not leave this Depression-era icon as is? E.C. Segar perhaps unwittingly created a hero for his times. He straddled the conflicting impulses that occupied so much of 30s popular culture, a rage at the machine and a hunger for an organic folk renewal. He was part Hollywood gangster, part Tom Joad, the angry moralist who had had enough. But in the fateful story arc of 1936, when “orphink” Popeye catches up with the father that abandoned him, Poopdeck Pappy, Segar himself puts father and son on the couch. “But ain’t ya jus’a little glad to see yer son?” asks our hero? “NAW!” Poopdeck replies. Trauma, resentment, guilt, projection, repression, masculine insecurity – they all surface along the way. Segar creates a kind of vernacular psychology to unpack Popeye’s Pappy issues. And like much of what made this strip great, Segar manages to be at once screwball and serious.
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