Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Popeye Volume 4: Swee’pea & Eugene the Jeep is the last volume collecting E. C. Segar’s Sunday newspaper strips featuring his eponymous Sailor Man and friends, from February 23, 1936 to October 2, 1938. Popeye was published seven days a week, but as with almost all newspaper strips both then and now the six days of black and white, four panel strips had continuing storylines that were completely separate from the colour full-page Sunday strips. These had different continuing stories, partly to deal with the two kinds of newspaper buyers – many people bought newspapers only once a week – and to make life simpler for the production process without trying to co-ordinate the two streams. This does mean little oddnesses between the strips, as significant events that happen in one place have to be referenced in the other. New characters and situations are introduced twice, brought in without explanation, or sometimes ignored completely.
The storyline introducing the infant Swee’pea ran in the daily Popeye strip, and he appears abruptly in Popeye Volume 3 with just a couple of panels to explain him: a baby that Popeye decides to adopt, making him and Olive into a kind of nuclear family although mostly it’s the relationship between man and boy that the stories centre on as Popeye tries to do his best for him. In a very funny sequence at the beginning of this book the Sea Hag reappears, bidding Alice the Goon to kidnap Swee’pea for revenge. That doesn’t work, but Swee’pea disappears anyway and Popeye has to defend his parenting style: “Don’t ya dare incinerake I ain’t been a good mother to Swee’pea! I been more’n a mother to him! I yam a perfeck male sex mother, tha’s what! I been a father to him, too – I been even a aunt, an’a uncle an’a cousing, too. I got the abiliky to ack like both mother and father to a infink – Tha’s why I yam sucha good parents – I yam amphibious”, he tells Olive.
Segar has two more innovations to keep his strip evolving in these last two years, first with the introduction of a curious, magical creature who can teleport, called Eugene the Jeep, whose unpredictable powers cause all kinds of havoc alone or when when teamed with Swee’pea; and Popeye’s actual dad: Poopdeck Pappy, whose resemblance to his son is so striking that many kinds of mistaken identity shenanigans are bound to occur, especially when Poopdeck Pappy falls in love with Olive. Most of the same story elements are shuffled and reshuffled in this volume: Wimpy’s constant insatiable greediness gets him into trouble; Popeye punches his way out of any tough situation; Olive loves Popeye and then she’s tired of him, and then she wants him back; Popeye gains fabulous wealth, then loses or gives all the money away, etc, yet Segar keeps the strip funny with antagonists ranging from tough-as-nails boxing opponents to Men from Mars and an entire race of Goons.
The introductory strip is by artist and designer Kayla E, featuring an alternate origin for the Jeep. This is a very well-presented series for a historically significant American newspaper comic strip, and you might not want or need to own all four Popeye volumes since there is quite a lot of repetition, but you should definitely try at least one of them.
