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According to a writer named Brian Braiker in Newsweek (Oct. 30, 2006), “There was nothing new in… exhibiting cartoons even back in 1974, when Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, founded the Museum of Cartoon Art…. But to “˜establish a canon of… the most influential artists working in the medium’? That’s the mission of “˜Masters of American Comics,'” the landmark exhibition which I began reviewing last week.

Perhaps Braiker never visited the Museum of Cartoon Art (whose founder, Mort, not incidentally is the father of Brian Walker, co-curator of “Masters”) when it was still in Port Chester, but it had a “hall of fame” gallery which, in effect, was an attempt to establish a pantheon of the greatest artists in the cartoon art medium, including many of those honored by the “Masters” show.

One major difference is that the Museum of Cartoon Art (which is currently homeless), the Words and Pictures Museum (permanently closed) in Northampton, Massachusetts, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, and New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (both institutions still alive and kicking) all operated outside the mainstream establishment of art museums and art scholarship.

According to one of the Masters, Art Spiegelman, the show originated in his reaction to what he considered the condescending attitude towards comics that was taken by the Museum of Modern Art in its notorious 1980s exhibition “High and Low.” In 1992 he invited curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Library of Congress and other institutions to his studio to show them slides of the work of over twenty cartoonists and propose a museum exhibition that would treat comics seriously as an artform. Two years later, one of the attendees, Ann Philbin, on becoming head of the Hammer Museum in California, started work on what became the “Masters” show. The unspoken subtext of Spiegelman’s story is that obviously the representatives of the other museums were not sufficiently persuaded that comics were art. “I have all sorts of issues with the idea that a [Roy] Lichtenstein painting of a comic-book panel is art, but the original comic panel it draws on is not considered art,” Spiegelman said in the Nov. 28, 2005 issue of Time. (However, thanks to a recent donation of cartoon art, the Library of Congress is mounting its own show this fall.

So “Masters” is indeed groundbreaking. Spiegelman also said in that same issue of Time, “What comics are going through is like a civil rights movement,” says Spiegelman. “This museum show will help.” Braiker claims that “the idea of ivory-tower cred seems anathema to this most outré of outsider arts.” But comics are simply following the same path to cultural and scholarly respectability that other forms of popular culture have over the centuries. As critic Richard Corliss observed in his review of “Masters” for Time (Nov. 28, 2005), “Like Hitchcock thrillers and rock ‘n’ roll, comics are obeying the tidal pull of pop culture. What was once forbidden is now mainstream; what was once junk is now classic.”

But at the panel about the “Masters” show at this year’s San Diego Comic Con (see “Comics in Context” #145), the question was raised whether people might assume that the fifteen cartoonists saluted by the exhibition were the only ones who were worthy of being placed in this canon of great comics art. Brian Walker said, “I hope this group of fifteen isn’t set in stone.”

The “Masters” canon has already come under sharp criticism for excluding female cartoonists. That charge seems to me to derive more from political correctness than serious artistic considerations. What worries me is that I believe the selection of this canon of Masters implies a viewpoint on the evolution of the comics medium that unjustly eliminates the work of numerous comics professionals, male and female, from consideration, as I hope to show in future installments.

During its East Coast engagement, the first half of the “Masters” show is being held at the Newark Museum, and when I left off last week, I had begun a discussion of the work of the second Master in the show, Lyonel Feininger, creator of the early 20th century strips The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World.

The introductory wall text for the Feininger section of the show states that “The flat color schemes and open spaces of his pages were inspired by his fascination with Japanese prints. . . .” Perhaps this is so, since many Western artists have been inspired by Japanese prints since Japan began trading with the West in the mid-19th century. But aren’t the “flat color schemes” also a necessity imposed by the four-color printing methods used by newspapers and formerly by comic books? As for the “open spaces,” they are present in certain panels of the Feininger comics on display, such as the broad triangular forms representing rooftops in a Kin-der-Kids from September 9, 1906 (page 188 in the Masters of American Comics book). But in other cases Feininger’s panels look crowded, or even a whole page, like “The Triumphant Departure of the Kids in the Family Bathtub” (The Kin-der-Kids, May 6, 1906, Masters p. 36). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either: that page bursts with energy, as the Kids’ bathtub, a fleet of tugboats and an ocean liner all set sail, as an animate Statue of Liberty waves goodbye.

The Feininger page in the show that has the most “open space” is part of the
the online “slide show” accompanying New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman’s review of “Masters”. On this April 29, 1906 Kin-der-Kids page (p. 186 in the catalogue) Feininger’s self-caricature stands on a slate-grey floor against a white void. He portrayed himself as a puppeteer, with the cast members of Kin-der-Kids dangling from strings. Here is another example of a theatrical metaphor in early comics, with the comic strip likened to a puppet show, controlled by an unseen figure behind the stage, and the further implication that the cartoonist is a performer, who acts through his “puppets,” the characters in the strip. Each of the puppets bears a tag identifying him, and so does the puppeteer himself, whose tag reads, “Your Uncle Feininger.” This might even imply that Feininger’s self-caricature is yet another puppet, a public image as a fatherly storyteller, created by the unseen artist.

I prefer the rambunctiousness of the Kin-der-Kids pages to the fairy tale milieu of Wee Willie Winkie’s World. As “Masters” co-curator John Carlin points out in the show’s catalogue, everything in Wee Willie Winkie’s World is alive and anthropomorphized. In a September 23, 2006 page (p. 38) enormous storm clouds with faces loom over a house, whose windows become terrified eyes. Here I am reminded of the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which also has clouds with faces that blow gale-force winds, and in which Night is a goddess spreading her vast cloak across the sky. For my taste, though, Feininger’s stylized fantasy world in Wee Willie Winkie runs a poor second to Winsor McCay’s dream worlds in Little Nemo, which he presents in such persuasively detailed, concrete reality. I agree with Kimmelman in finding Feininger’s comics “a little lusterless sandwiched between Nemo and George Herriman’s great Krazy Kat.”

As usual, Carlin’s interest is in the cartoonist’s visual design for a page, emphasizing lines and shapes that can be regarded both as representational and as abstract elements. In the Sunday, September 16, 1906 Kin-der-Kids (p. 39), he contends that the waterspouts in the panels on the left side of the page form a “serpentine” line running from the bottom to the top of the page. I am more impressed with the waterspouts in the panels on the right side of the page, which seem to me to form a single funnel growing in size from the top of the page until it nearly fills the final panel.

In the Masters book Carlin asserts that “the run of Willie Winkie can be read as a prototypical graphic novel” (p. 40). Is it stretching the definition of “graphic novel” too far to refer to a series of Sunday comics pages this way? Later in the book, in his essay on Milton Caniff, journalist Pete Hamill reveals that “Caniff told me that he thought of the strip [Terry and the Pirates]–and his later creation, Steve Canyon–as a kind of picaresque novel, a form as old as Don Quixote“ (p. 232). Is a graphic novel necessarily a work of comics that is created specifically to be published in book form? It seems fair to me to consider Watchmen and V for Vendetta to be graphic novels, even though they were originally published in serialized “pamphlet” format. Moreover, following their original publication, new readers have experienced them as books, not as monthly comic magazines. So could Caniff’s Terry be considered a graphic novel, or each months-long story arc as an individual graphic novel?

Carlin justly praises the design of the show’s Krazy Kat Sunday page from Sept. 12, 1937 (p. 51). In the top left corner is a small panel featuring Ignatz Mouse, on his eternal quest to hurl bricks at Krazy Kat, determined that he will not be thwarted again by his nemesis Offissa Pupp: “He’ll not foil me, that Kop.” In the top right corner is a panel of the same size, with Offissa Pupp vowing “He’ll not fool me, that mouse.” But Ignatz, hiding in the base of a cactus plant in that same panel, already has. The rest of the page consists of a gigantic panel, stretching from the top middle to the bottom, and, as Carlin notes, dominated by the vertical column of the cactus, shown at its full height. It looks like an obelisk, or Washington’s Monument, in contrast with the flat ground below. Ignatz is triumphantly at the top, dropping the brick, as if he were Galileo experimenting with gravity, as the oblivious Krazy, who considers these bricks as love tokens, leans nonchalantly against the bottom of the tree, saying, “He’ll not fail me, that dollink.” In the catalogue (Kat-alogue?) Carlin states that the play of words with “foil,” “fool,” and “fail” is a pun; I see the parallelism in the three characters’ lines of dialogue as a kind of poetry.

And there along the bottom of the page is a row of footlights, as if this were taking place onstage. Carlin compares it to a “theatrical presentation.” I’d go farther: it’s as if Krazy, Ignatz, and Pupp were a team of comedians performing their vaudeville act for the audience: their inexhaustible variations on the gag in which Krazy gets clobbered. Standing center stage, with his/her (Krazy’s gender is uncertain) name at the top, Krazy is the star of the show. The towering cactus and the simple setting are like a stage set, with the night sky like a black backdrop.

Krazy, Ignatz and Pupp are therefore presented as actors playing roles in the comic strip. The same conceit underlies Friz Freleng’s 1940 animated short You Oughta Be in Pictures, in which Daffy Duck manipulates Porky Pig into confronting Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger (shown in live action) and quitting, or, in more recent decades, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), which purport that animated characters are actors working at Hollywood studios. The same basic idea recurred in comics when Li’l Abner would visit Al Capp, or Pogo characters would refer to their creator Walt Kelly, or the She-Hulk would complain to her unseen writer/artist John Byrne.

Hence, a further implication of this Krazy Kat Sunday is that the unseen Herriman is the writer/director, putting on a show for the audience reading their newspapers at home in the 1930s–or perusing a museum exhibit in 2006.

In reading comics, we ordinarily suspend our disbelief and pretend that static lines on paper are actually living, moving characters; hence, the panels become windows into their world. Herriman’s footlights subvert this convention: we’re no longer looking at characters in a real world but at actors on a stage. Herriman has reminded us that Krazy Kat is an artificial construction, and, of course, if we take a step further, we remind ourselves that Krazy Kat is really a drawing in a newspaper.

To continue the theatrical analogy, Carlin’s approach in the Masters book is Brechtian: he stands back from the story the comics tell, and even from their attempts to visually represent reality, and insists on regarding them as if they were abstract works comprised of line, shapes and (often) colors.

Kimmelman asserts that Krazy Kat’s desert setting anticipates the work of Samuel Beckett, presumably meaning the play Waiting for Godot. As Godot demonstrates, Beckett also loved slapstick humor and vaudeville-style comedy routines, and I suppose that Ignatz’s brick throwing is the way by which he, Krazy and Pupp pass the time in the strip’s desolate landscape. But there’s no sense of comedy staving off despair and emptiness in Krazy Kat as there is in Godot.

In his essay on Herriman in the catalogue, cultural critic Stanley Crouch points out that Krazy Kat‘s desert milieu was inspired by Monument Valley, the site where John Ford shot so many of his Westerns, and asserts that the desert is “especially American” because it is “the harsh landscape” for “brutal conflicts,” presumably meaning the wars with Indians (p. 197). That may be true for Ford, but I can’t swallow the idea that Krazy Kat alludes to violence worse than being hit by a brick which is as harmless in this strip as a custard pie. Monument Valley might also be the inspiration for the terrain in Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. Maybe Jones and Herriman (whose Krazy Kat cast also includes a coyote) simply regarded the desert as the simplest of naturalistic settings. Despite the way that Herriman’s backgrounds shapeshift from panel to panel, their simplicity does not distract from the performances of his lead characters. Hence Herriman is practicing a sort of graphic minimalism, making him a forebear of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

What most interests me about the Krazy Kat strips in the “Masters” show is the “metacomics” theme that runs throughout the exhibition. In the Sunday page for June 11, 1939 (p. 48), Ignatz finds a brush and a bottle of ink, and sets about drawing a cartoon of himself. As Carlin notes, Ignatz is repeatedly depicted in Krazy Kat as an artist. So Herriman may be signaling his identification with this trickster character: he draws himself, or an aspect of himself, into the strip as Ignatz, just as Ignatz draws himself. Ignatz starts out by drawing a cartoon panel, but it seems that he is also drawing a canvas in thin air, thereby creating it. Moreover, as I said before, a comics panel is like a window into another world. So Ignatz, as artist, creates another reality, just as Herriman is the creator of the world of Krazy Kat. The characters and things that Ignatz draws onto this canvas appear in red ink, whereas the “real” world of Krazy Kat appears in conventional black outlines. This contrast further suggests that the world of Ignatz’s drawings is a distinctly separate level of reality.

Offissa Pupp stops by and acts as audience (and, in his role as law enforcer, potential censor?) for Ignatz’s art. The “cartoon” Ignatz that “real” Ignatz draws changes position from one of Herriman’s panels to the next. (It’s getting complicated here.) Is “real” Ignatz drawing a comic strip, and each new panel replaces the previous one? Or is Herriman suggesting that “real” Ignatz is creating an animated cartoon, whose characters move once they are drawn, as in Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series, to which “real” Ignatz’s ink bottle could be an allusion? Or are the Ignatz and Krazy that “real” Ignatz draws existing in an alternate reality?

“Real” Ignatz completes his cartoon, which shows “cartoon” Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy. This seems to be “real” Ignatz’s foremost goal and pleasure in life, so perhaps Herriman is suggesting that artists draw what they desire, what makes them happy. As if feeling satisfied and fulfilled, “real” Ignatz starts walking away, while Offissa Pupp remains rooted to the spot, staring at the cartoon-within-a-cartoon.

In the next panel, as if he were Matisse responding to seeing a Picasso, Offissa Pupp reacts to Ignatz’s cartoon by drawing his own, titled “JAIL,” portraying Ignatz behind bars. This, of course, represents Pupp’s own foremost goal in life. But he is oblivious to what is happening behind him: “real” Ignatz is throwing a brick at Krazy, just as his counterpart did in the cartoon-within-a-cartoon. Thus life, in the Krazy Kat universe, mimics art.

So “real” Ignatz’s cartoon was actually a declaration of his intentions, which he then accomplished in “real” life. You could also read “real” Ignatz’s cartoon as a prophesy of the future, which comes to pass in the next panel. Likewise, Offissa Pupp is drawing what he intends to accomplish. This too is a look into the future, because what Krazy Kat reader doubts that “real” Ignatz will soon end up back in jail for this latest brick-throwing incident?

But you could also read this particularly Sunday strip as trickster Ignatz pulling a new con on Offissa Pupp. It’s like that standard Bugs Bunny gag in which Bugs tricks an adversary into mechanically repeating the same action over and over. Offissa Pupp becomes so fixated on “real” Ignatz’s drawing of himself clobbering Krazy that the hapless policeman preoccupies himself with punishing “cartoon” Ignatz by drawing “cartoon” Ignatz in jail. Having thus distracted Offissa Pupp, “real” Ignatz is free to clobber the “real” Krazy.

The con artist is a particularly American form of the trickster archetype, which reappears in the “Masters” show as E. C. Segar’s J. Wellington Wimpy, and also as Charles Schulz’s Lucy. In his essay in the catalogue, Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell points to Krazy Kat’s influence on Schulz (p. 243). Isn’t Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown year after year Schulz’s possibly intentional version of Herriman’s endless variations on Ignatz’s brick tossing?

Along the bottom of this Sunday Krazy page runs a narrow panel that serves as an afterword to the main story. Krazy, Pupp, and Ignatz all watch a bird who is staring at a painting of a tree, as a big drop of saliva drops from his beak. “But he’s an “˜ott krittik,’ ain’t he?” asks Krazy. “Yes,” replies Pupp, “but he’s also a woodpecker.” Granted this epiphany, Ignatz responds, “ah-h.” Herriman may be making the point that an art critic’s personal psychology influences his response to a work of art. Or maybe this can even be seen as a reproach (over sixty years in advance) to Carlin’s approach to comics as “abstract” works: Herriman may be reminding readers not to ignore the representationalist aspect of the work.,

Next in the “Masters” show comes E. C. Segar, creator of Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye, whose very title continues the analogy between comics and theater.

Carlin’s discussion of Segar in the Masters book has its problems. Take for example his description of what he calls a “brilliant sight gag” in the genuinely great “Plunder Island” story arc in Thimble Theater‘s Sunday pages in 1934. In one installment Popeye hides in a barrel because his enemy, the Sea Hag, has ordered Wimpy to behead him. “Several weeks later,” in another Sunday page (July 1, 1934), Popeye plays dice with the Sea Hag to determine ownership of the treasure of Plunder Island; the Hag desperately wagers everything she has, even her clothes, and ends up wearing “the same-style wooden barrel that Popeye hid in weeks earlier” (p. 58). Well, Segar may have intended the irony, but I doubt that he expected it to get laughs from readers. A comedian doesn’t deliver a punch line several weeks after the set-up, which by then the audience has forgotten.

Likewise, Carlin claims that “Segar’s humor came straight out of Mark Twain, who also balanced exaggerated tall tales and a perfect ear for everyday speech with dark themes that undercut his laugh-out-loud stories” (p. 55). There are similarities, but I doubt there was a “straight out” connection. Twain’s “tall tales” went so far as to include time travel in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but in that novel he characteristically brings a subversively ironic treatment to the romance of Arthurian legend. Amidst all the comedy of Thimble Theatre, Segar created a genuine American hero of larger-than-life proportions in Popeye, a successor to the likes of Pecos Bill. I suspect that Segar used Popeye as a seafaring traveler to create a satirical version of the adventure stories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, complete with fantasy elements: hence not only searches for hidden treasure and Popeye’s famed quest to find his long-lost Pappy, but also mythical kingdoms (Spinachovia), magical animals (Eugene the Jeep), strange savages (the Goons), and even an evil witch (the Sea Hag).

More importantly, Segar deals in exaggeration in creating the personalities of his most significant characters, whereas Twain aimed for realism. One can imagine Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn being real people in a real world, but Popeye, Wimpy and company are inescapably cartoons, not only in their caricatured physiques but in their characterizations. Robert Altman and Jules Feiffer’s live action Popeye movie (1980) did not work, and perhaps there was no way that it could.

Carlin correctly agrees with comics historian Bill Blackbeard’s recognition that Popeye is a proto-superhero. (In a Sunday October 11, 1936 strip in the show, and on page 54 in the book, Popeye lifts up an entire house, without the aid of spinach.) But then Carlin goes on, “At the same time Popeye is a much more complex and sympathetic character than the later superheroes, who tend to be somewhat stiff and colorless” (p. 58). How much “later”? Once Stan Lee and his colleagues revolutionized the superhero genre in the 1960s, this was unquestionably no longer true.

Feiffer’s own appreciation of Segar and Popeye in the Masters book is far more successful. Feiffer makes the case that Popeye is the heroic representation of the American spirit that remained “undaunted” by the Great Depression of the 1930s: “Popeye was the forgotten man: uneducated, unsophisticated, untamable” (p. 208). More surprisingly, whereas I always thought that Popeye’s distinctive way of talking reflected his lower class background and lack of formal education, Feiffer regards it as a sign of something else: “His mangled English pulsated with the vital spirit of immigrant America. . .” (p. 208). Best of all, Feiffer identifies Popeye’s true peers: Segar’s “Popeye stands with the best of his thirties competitors, who happened not to be comic strip characters but movie clowns: W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers” (p. 208). They portrayed larger than life characters, too.

My main disagreement with Feiffer’s essay is with his blanket condemnation of Popeye’s entire history in animation, though Feiffer rightly praises the performances of voice actors Jack Mercer and Mae Questel as Popeye and Olive Oyl. Feiffer is also right about the uninspired Popeye cartoons produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, which smoothed over the rough edges that make Popeye’s personality interesting, devolving him into a postwar suburban bourgeois.

But I think Feiffer is unfair about the Max and Dave Fleischer Popeye cartoons of the 1930s, which keep the title character irascible and irreverent (especially through Mercer’s seemingly improvised asides). Feiffer disdains the formula that the Fleischers devised for Popeye: the Popeye-Olive-Bluto triangle, and the seemingly magical ability of spinach to boost the hero’s strength in time of need. But within the seven or eight minutes allotted to one of these animated cartoons, the Fleischers understandably couldn’t undertake one of Segar’s elaborate narratives (although they tried with the search for Pappy in the 1938 short Goonland).

I think it’s also worth exploring why the Fleischers’ formula proved so successful. If Popeye is indeed a hero born of the Great Depression, as Feiffer argues, then the key moment in the Fleischer cartoons, when Popeye declares “That’s all I kin stand, I can’t stands no more” (a forebear of Bugs Bunny’s “Of course you know this means war” and even Droopy’s “You know what? You got me mad.”), downs the spinach, and lets loose, dramatizes the urge of the forgotten man to fight back against everything that holds him down. Feiffer dismisses the cartoons’ spinach as “steroids”; I see it more as an objective correlative for Popeye’s will power, stimulating the burst of adrenaline he needs to win.

The best Fleischer Popeye cartoons don’t necessarily adhere to formula; take the cases of Goonland and The Jeep (1938), in which Bluto never appears. And even the better Fleischer cartoons that use the triangle can ring imaginative variations on the theme, just as Krazy Kat did with its own formula. For example, the Fleischers’ celebrated A Dream Walking (1934) is less about Popeye competing with Bluto for Olive than about the three of them rhythmically sleepwalking along a vertiginous network of girders in a skyscraper under construction, in a triumph of visual design John Carlin would appreciate.

This gives me the opportunity to mention two of the last cartoons I still haven’t written about that I saw at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2005 retrospective of musical cartoons, “I Love to Singa” (see “Comics in Context” #100, #136 and many others in between). In the two color featurettes Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937) shown there, the Fleischers rework their formula by recasting Bluto as characters out of the Arabian Nights. Popeye becomes not only an explorer but an American venturing abroad to combat foreign enemies. Following the 9/11 attacks, the sight of Popeye taking on Arabian adversaries takes on new resonance. Significantly, Popeye’s final, triumphant battles against his foreign opponents are accompanied on the soundtracks by John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” In these featurettes the Fleischers seem to be consciously portraying Popeye as a modern American mythic hero, who can stand up to and overcome morally corrupt mythic figures of older cultures. Sindbad even turns Popeye into a monster slayer, placing him in a tradition that goes back to Gilgamesh.

In the Masters book Carlin states that “Segar did not invent graphic comic strip conventions or experiment with them the way that Herriman and McCay did. Segar simply showed how rich and supple those conventions could be in terms of creating believable characters and stories. . .” (p. 56). In other words, in this case Carlin shifts from his usual emphasis on visual design to what I consider the true essence of the comics medium: visual storytelling.

Even so, I suspect that Carlin underrates Segar as visual innovator. Where would Robert Crumb be without Segar, whose drawing style clearly influenced his? In “Masters” I was pleased to see examples of Segar’s “topper” strip for the Sunday Thimble Theatres, Sappo, which began as a rather dull domestic comedy, but flared into life with the addition of science fiction elements courtesy of the aptly named Professor O. G. Wottasnozzle. Apart from his sizable snozzle, the Professor, bald with a long beard, could be a relative of Crumb’s Mr. Natural. The henpecked Sappo’s wife, who towers over him, could be a forerunner of Crumb’s own unusually large women. Segar’s standard face for extras in Thimble Theatre could be the visage of Crumb’s Flakey Foont.

Going through the Segar section of the exhibit, I was struck by the sheer dynamic force power of the shots of Popeye punching his opponents. These panels reminded me of the work of Jack Kirby, who was once an in-betweener at the Fleischer studios. In the Masters book you can find shots like this on pages 59, 204 and 205, but what most impressed me was a series of Sunday Thimble Theatre strips that are at the Newark Museum but not in the catalogue. Running from April 26 through May 24, 1931, they depict Popeye in a boxing match, full of such Kirbyesque power. The sequence also demonstrates Segar’s visual inventiveness. At one point Popeye is hit so hard he sails into the air, and we follow his flight through a series of panels, as if they were successive framers on a film strip, until he lands atop a spectator in the audience. In another panel Segar deploys multiple images of Popeye to indicate the speed and ferocity of his punches. Segar also portrays the audience as a sea of identical round heads, creating a near-abstract effect.

Some Popeye strips on display also echo earlier parts of the exhibit. An enormous drawing of Eugene the Jeep hovers atop the panel grid of the Sunday, August 9, 1936 Thimble Theatre page (p. 209) like the moon with the man’s face in the December 3, 1905 Little Nemo (p. 176). There’s also a Sunday Thimble Theatre from August 23, 1935 (p. 205), which I’ve discussed previously (in “Comics in Context” #63), in which, to test Popeye’s love for her, Olive masquerades as a man (not difficult, considering her build) and claims to be her own suitor. Enraged, Popeye clobbers her. Dazed but happy, Olive tells herself, “He loves me,” as if she were Krazy Kat right after being hit by a brick.

Like so many cartoon characters, Segar’s are far more resistant to physical injury than real people are. For example, Popeye withstands a hail of bullets in an April 7, 1932 daily strip (p. 206). Even so, the comedic sadism in this particular Sunday strip is startling. In a daily strip from August 21, 1935 on display (but not in the book), Popeye has become “dictipator” of a small country but is disappointed that “Me sheeps”–his subjects–“ain’t got no sense.” As you can see, unlike the animated Popeye, Segar’s Popeye, as Feiffer notes, is “untamable”: though a hero, he has a violent temper and even a will to power.

At the Newark Museum I overheard one woman, who was looking at the Herrimans, comment to her companion, “Is this really for kids? Look at the vocabulary?” There are plenty of people who haven’t yet gotten the memo that comics aren’t just for kids. As Spiegelman told Time, maybe this museum show will help. We will continue making our way through “Masters” in next week’s column.

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–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson