POPEYE Comic Strips

 

This year, I just recently began collecting actual newspaper Sunday comic and daily strips of POPEYE from the years 1938 to 1946 after the premature death of Popeye's creator E.C. Segar in 1938.

 

My interest to discover POPEYE stories during those "lost years" after Segar's death and before Bud Sagendorf took over in the late 1950's led me to look online for actual comic strips because King Features (at least to my knowledge) has never reprinted the entire 1930's through 1950's comic strips. I guess here and there they might have been reprinted in an old comic or two.

 

I had never even seen or read the POPEYE comic strips with the Tom Sims (writer), Doc Winner (artist), Bill "Bela" Zeboly (artist), and Ralphi Stein (writer) circa that twenty-year period between 1938-1958 that led me recently to acquiring some strips (thanks to eBay) from the World War Two era. 

 

It has been pretty exciting to see and read. I've purchased some portfolios and I've been placing and curating them carefully in those this past week.

 

I live in Springfield, Illinois. I purchased several years worth of POPEYE strips from someone in Chicago. To my amazement, the POPEYE comic strips I bought from this one dealer happened to be from the Illinois State Journal from the 1941-1945 which is actually the "local" newspaper (which merged with another local paper years ago to become The Illinois State Journal-Register. ) To my surprise, as I turned over the comic strips, I was reading local history. That was a nice bonus.

 

My friends in Springfield will like this... as I'm seeing pieces of history in the paper from those times about the Esquire Movie Theater, the Myers Building, the Carrie Post King Daughter's Home, Staab Funeral, and so much more. I'm also seeing some familiar last names of people in the obituaries and I have to wonder if they might be grandparents or great-grandparents of some of my friends.

 

One weird thing happened... I was watching a documentary on Golden Age actress Joan Blondell on YouTube... and at the same exact moment as I was watching the video, I was collating these comic strips into my portfolio and flipping them over to read the Springfield, Illinois parts... well, an advertisement for Joan's new movie CRY HAVOC was in the newspaper just as I was watching the video that brought up CRY HAVOC. Weird.

 

I've never seen the film, so it is now on my list because I believe synchronicity is calling me to go see it.