‘Thimble Theatre & the Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar: Revised and Expanded’ (review)

Written and Illustrated by by E. C. Segar
Edited by Peter Maresca
Introduction by Paul C. Tumey
Contributors: Jeet Heer, Michael Tisserand
Published by Fantagraphics / Sunday Press Books

It isn’t exactly lost history but as time goes on it does become more and more forgotten and that’s a shame.

I’m talking about Thimble Theatre, a newspaper comic strip by Elzie Segar that originally appeared more than one hundred years ago now.

It’s the strip where, in 1929, the formidable Popeye character first appeared, a character that the late comics historian Bill Blackbeard once called “the first (arf, arf!) superhero of them all.” Popeye and his “goil” Olive Oyl went on to be the stuff of pop culture legend.

The part of this story that’s fading away is that Thimble Theatre was in existence for a full decade before Popeye ever made his first appearance!

Up to the plate steps Sunday Press, with their book, Thimble Theatre & the Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar—a revised second edition, yet! It’s not a complete reprinting of the strip, mind you, but we do start out with the very first color Sunday strip, from 1925, and go on until we reach Popeye’s first Sunday appearance six years later.

Every strip fills a full page, including even its top strip Sappo—also by Segar—once it starts. Top strips were there for papers that ran full page comics but easily removed for those papers that did not. The Sappo strips were short, often quite funny, gag strips about a little guy, John Sappo, and his wife. Sappo is almost a dead ringer for the hero of the main strip, Castor Oyl, albeit with a little hair and a sometime mustache.

Castor Oyl is, as one might suspect from the name, the brother of Olive Oyl. He and Olive had been around for the entire run of Thimble Theatre, along with Harold Hamgravy (later changed to just plain (and punnier) Ham Gravy, Olive’s beau and as time went on Castor’s sidekick.

At first mostly just weekly gags, at one point Castor Oyl heads out west to the desert and his real adventures begin. First, he buys a mirage thinking it’s a lake. We still have mostly gags but with the new setting a bit of continuity begins building up.

Eventually Ham Gravy reunites with his old buddy Castor and they have to deal with Indians, bandits, horses, outlaws, sheriffs, saloons, and prospecting. Just about every western cliché in the book. They finally decide to give it all up and return home, only for Ham Gravy to find his longtime sweetie Olive in the arms of Popeye, the sailor man!

Reading along, one can sense the rapidly developing storytelling skills of Segar. The Popeye years that followed offer what I consider the best storylines and best-told stories of any continuity strip ev

At the front of the book, we look even further back into the artist’s development in some 20 entertaining and informative pages on his first forays into cartooning, Charlie Chaplin, and the beginnings of Thimble Theatre.

All of the strips in this book are beautifully reproduced and with what strongly appears to be their original color. I have no idea what the source was for such marvelously preserved pages but they are much appreciated and preferred to so many of the collections that think computer recoloring is better. (Hint-It’s not.)

Sunday Press and editor Peter Maresca are to be congratulated for turning out such a lovely and historically important book that also turns out to be great fun to read as well. Thimble Theatre & the Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar is a tad overpriced for only 158 pages but content-wise, more than appreciated.

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