The Press: Successful Sailor

Popeye is a hot-tempered, bulge-muscled, lantern-jawed sailorman created by the late Cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar.

Last week Popeye in the flesh (of Actor Harry Foster Welch) stalked into the Washington office of Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark, Chief of Naval Operations to the OPNAV he presented a belligerent self-portrait, to be used as official insignia for a new squadron of Navy bombers. Said the Admiral pridefully: “You have always been an inspiration to men in the Navy. . . .”

One of the few surviving comic strips that are really meant to be funny is Segar’s Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye. Thimble Theatre’s first cast consisted of gawky Heroine Olive Oyl and her dimwit brother Castor. They straggled along for ten years before Castor Oyl one day in 1929 encountered Popeye on a dock. Cried Castor: “Hey, are you a sailor?” Said Popeye dourly: “Ja think I was a cowboy?”

Since then over 600 commercial products have borne his name, including dolls, jewelry, fountain pens, wallpaper, soap, and 90 cinema shorts have featured him. For three years Segar’s sailor, who derives his prodigious strength from spinach, advertised Wheatena, then Popsicles, on the air. In 1935 Popeye paid Artist Segar $100,000 a year.

Three years ago, at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., Cartoonist Segar began to ail, died ten months later at the age of 43. King Features finally found a young Hungarian artist, Bela Zaboly, to draw the strip. Zaboly’s Popeye no longer goes to sea on long, fantastic voyages of discovery. But Popeye has more customers than ever before: over 500 daily, 200 Sunday papers.