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In-Class Blog: Popeye's Origins

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I had been watching Popeye from a very early age. My mom was a big fan of the cartoons since she moved to the States, so she had a vast collection of Popeye cartoons on cassette tapes. Though this is so nostalgic to me, I never knew about the comic strips. The Popeye in the comic world is vastly different from the animation Popeye as well. In the comics, Popeye wasn’t even the main character until much later. He was still a brawly sailor who beat people up with ease, but the iconic spinach of the cartoons was never introduced in the comics. Bruno, Popeye’s rival, didn’t make an appearance as well. Reading these panels made me wonder how much I truly knew about Popeye, because apparently I know very little about his origins.
I enjoyed reading these comics because they are relatively easy to flip through. With minimal sentences and neat rectangular panels, you can go through several pages in a short amount of time. In the beginning, there was a lot more dialogue so the bubbles would take up half of the panel space. As the comic improved, that space got smaller and easier to read. Sometimes the word bubbles looked squished if there was conversational dialogue, but I think that was just because of the narrow panel format. If you were to type out the whole sentence on a standard page, I’m sure it would barely reach one line. Many panels would only have one word bubble or just a simple sound effect, so it would make up for previous “dialogue-heavy” panels. I also found it interesting that the whole book was continuous and not a collection of short-running gags. I guess my assumption came from the many standalone episodes I’ve watched growing up. It was fun to follow a whole story rather than small segments, since it allows the reader to learn more about the character’s personalities.


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