The Sunday Funnies - What's A Jeep?

Fantagraphics has a real winner in the fifth volume of E.C. Segar's Popeye series. As the title "What A Jeep?" reveals the delightful fanciful critter which can tell the future and walk through walls because of its fourth-dimensional nature is a big part of the action in these tales. 

The dailies pick up with Popeye still "Dictopater" of his "Sheeps" in Spinachovia, the land he discovered and fashioned to fill up his desire for a place to be his own boss and other peoples' too. These are some hilarious moments as Popeye with his itty-bitty crown in place atop his rounded noggin tries to soothe the uproar in his "Sheeps" (it's what he calls his citizens) as they demand wives, and later peace when another territory wants to go to war. The former demand for women results in some awkward solutions involving mermaids and later pre-ordered brides. The war is solved with typical Popeye logic when he goes and fights most of it on his own when his cowardly subjects prefer not to bother. Eventually he wearies of being a leader despite having the monstrous Toar on his side and heads back home with Olive where soon enough a box arrives for the latter and in it is a "Jeep". The delightfully mysterious Eugene the Jeep then becomes the focus for several storylines, one in which a rich man wants to buy the critter and we discover his mysterious powers, and finally one in which Popeye is led by the prognostications of the Jeep to seek out his long-lost father. The search for Poopdeck Pappy wraps up the run of dailies and they find him and bring him back to add to the rich cast of Thimble Theater. 

In the Sunday pages it's a lost less hectic with Wimpy once again dominating the proceedings. Much of the early entries deal with an odyssey to Slither Creek to look for gold. It ends up after much hijinks that only Wimpy stumbles across any and they return home where he opens up his own eatery which quickly goes bust. Some great gags are had when Olive tries to get Popeye to have a more modern attitude to dating and eventually the Jeep too invades the proceedings to grand effect. 

The "Sappo" strip undergoes the greatest transformation during this period. The series is as we left it focused on the inventions of Prof. Wotsasnozzle which reduce weight and size and later allow mirror images to come to life. But quickly the feature becomes a gimmick in which Segar plays with making images out of the alphbet and later numbers. This is an absorption of "Popeye's Cartoon Club" into the Sappo strip which gets smaller as the time wears on. 

Fun stuff indeed, but that's come to be expected. There's one more volume in the Fantagraphics run of Segar's classic run. More on that next week. 

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