Today, we look at how Popeye became such a major part of Christmas without Christmas being a major part of his comic strip.
It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye!
WHY WAS POPEYE'S COMIC STRIP CALLED 'THIMBLE THEATRE'?
Comic strips, more than most other art forms, tend to be one of the most malleable art forms in terms of story consistency. What I mean is that if you start watching a TV series about, say, a United States Marshal, like Gunsmoke, there is a very good chance that, by the end of the series' run on TV, you'll still be watching a show about a U.S. marshal. The same goes for superhero comics for the most part, as well. However, with comic strips, the daily format will often lead to some rather dramatic developments in the format of the comic strip if the creator finds that certain ideas aren't working as well anymore. The world of comics is filled with comic strips that started with one lead and ended up with a dramatically different star by the end of the series. One of the most notable examples of this concept is Elzie Crisler Seger's Thimble Theatre, which launched in 1919.
Initially, the comic strip followed the comedic misadventures of the semi-slacker, Harold Hamgravy (eventually referred to as simply Ham Gravy), as well as his girlfriend/fiancee, Olive Oyl, and her constantly scheming brother, Castor Oyl (Castor Oyl was a nice guy, he was just always coming up with get rich schemes that would turn out to be dangerous). Ham Gravy was relatively bland as a character, so by 1925, the more interesting Castor Oyl had become the main character in the strip, which also coincided with Segar making the series more serialized in nature. In 1929, Castor Oyl needs a boat captain to take him to a casino island, and he hired a sailor named Popeye and, well, the rest is history.
Popeye the Sailor was obviously only intended to be part of this one story arc, but soon, fan demand was so great that Popeye was brought back to the strip, and soon became the new star of the series, with Ham Gravy ultimately being sent to comic book limbo as Popeye and Olive Oyl became the new romantic leads of the series. Castor Oyl remained for a while as Popeye's friend, but eventually even he was pushed out of the strip.
A number of other major characters were then added to support the new star, Popeye, including J. Wellington Wimpy, who would famously gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Other new characters include Swee'Pea, an abandoned baby that Popeye adopted, and the mysterious Eugene the Jeep, a magical animal-like being. Segar also added a bunch of interesting villains for Popeye, including the Sea Hag.
The strip became Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye eventually, and after many years, Popeye took over the name entirely. Popeye was adapted into cartoons, and became one of the most successful comic strip characters of the 20th Century.
HOW DID POPEYE CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS IN THE COMICS?
E.C. Segar was Jewish, and a result, he tended not to work Christmas into his comics. An early exception was this 1920 Christmas strip with Ham Gravy flirting with Olive Oyl...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
However, Ham Gravy was a notable exception since he was one of the only characters in the strip NOT intended to be Jewish (hence his name being "Ham," a non-kosher meat). Segar coded the Oyl family and most of the cast (including Popeye) as Jewish (although not explicitly so, this being 1930s America, after all). So that was why Segar continued to eschew Christmas plots. Segar sadly died in 1938. The new Popeye creators were writer Tom Sims and artist Doc Winner, who did this early Christmas ad featuring Popeye and the gang...
This was part of a series of cards given to newspapers to help promote King Syndicates comic strips. Ever since Popeye took over Thimble Theatre, the strip had become one of King's most popular strips, and thus, one of the most popular strips in the entire country.
Sims and Winner followed Segar's lead regarding Christmas, and when Winner was replaced by Bela Zaboly in 1939, it remained the same. The other notable exception to the generally Jewish cast was Wimpy, so when Sims/Zaboly did anything involving Christmas, it would be centered around Wimpy, like this following 1949 Popeye Christmas story, where Wimpy snares a number of invitations to holiday dinner, and he attends each one of them to gorge himself on turkey...
Click here to enlarge the image.
A few years later, Sims/Zaboly had an arc where Popeye somehow runs into his parents, just in time for a holiday (not explicitly Christmas) dinner...
With his success as a cartoon character, though, Popeye is almost more well-known now for his cartoons than his comics. And in his cartoons, produced by people who were NOT as close to Segar's original ideas for the strips, there were plenty of Christmas-themed episodes (especially when the show started doing new cartoons for TV in 1960)...
This, amusingly, led to Popeye getting a comic strip in the British comic book periodical, TV Comics, and since this was based on the cartoon, which, unlike Segar's comics, was explicitly celebrating Christmas, Bill Melvin did this Christmas story...
Click here to enlarge the comic.
Popeye was one of those rare comics that was adapted into a cartoon which, in turn, was adapted into a comic book (other examples included The Batman Adventures and The X-Men Adventures comic books in the 1990s).
There was even a collection of Popeye Christmas stories in a book accompanied by a record...
But the main Popeye comic in those glory years rarely did Christmas comics, as the main strip creators, including famed longtime creator, Bud Sagendorf, knew what Segar's intentions were, so they tried to follow suit. Once you got outside the strip, though, just about everything else involving Popeye was all about Christmas...even Popeye Christmas trees!
Thanks so much to King Features' Editorial Director, Tea Fougner, for the valuable insight about Segar and his efforts to keep the characters coded Jewish, even as society of the time made it near impossible for them to fully embrace their Jewish side.
In any event, as noted, every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 5 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
You can see Popeye in action as Santa Claus.