Eye Lie Popeye and all the images you see in this review are owned by Massive Publishing and King Features
Written and drawn by Marcus Williams
I said what I liked about the first issue in my last review, but I also made it pretty clear what I didn’t want this series to be which would be to lean too heavily on the Shonen side and letting the Popeye stuff be mere window dressing. I can pull a dozen different manga off the shelf that will deliver on the action and style of this book, but new Popeye material? That stuff is rather thin on the ground these days, so as a dedicated fan of the Sailor Man, I’m hoping for a little more of that than the anime antics. Does this issue strike a balance between its two sources of inspiration, or will its two halves ultimately tear itself apart? Let’s find out!!
The story begins with our heroes from the last story trying to clean up the rubble after Popeye’s battle with the Sea Nymph Susie and getting an unexpected visit from Popeye’s figurative dad Whaler Joe as well as his actual dad Poopdeck Pappy. Sadly, the social call is cut short when another fighter goes crashing down to give Popeye a knuckle sandwich while Eugene the Jeep tries to explain to all of us what the heck is going on around here. The thing about Popeye cartoons is that it was just as much about its creative animation and wacky concepts as it was about the characters of Popeye, Bluto, and Olive. They were practically fairy tales about good and evil duking it out in ways that don’t make literal sense but have an aesthetic poetry to them. You’d think this would make it a perfect fit for the hyper stylized world of Shonen anime, but then Shonen tends to also take its lore very seriously and spends a lot of time explaining relative power levels and reiterating the stakes of every battle. For something like Popeye which is premised on a dude eating his vegetables and tooting his corncob pipe, over explaining the premise would be a detriment and there are no less than two scenes in this issue where they do just that. The Sea Hag makes sure we all know how magic works in this world, while Jeep goes into an extremely dense and unintuitive explanation of what makes Popeye so powerful. It’s so ludicrous that you’d think the book is trying to hang a lampshade on its own convoluted lore, but it seems like we’re supposed to be taking this seriously as there aren’t any reaction shots to the contrary; not even a befuddled look from Bluto.
What makes this tragically ironic is the other problem I have with this issue, and I suppose with the series as a whole, which is that they’re taking all this time to go through the techno-babble while we’ve simply jumped over so many interesting storylines that could have been the backbone of a phenomenal book. It seems this is only going to be a five-issue miniseries, which means we have to jump right into the action, but it feels like we’ve skipped over a lot of what makes Popeye’s story interesting. The biggest example of this issue is the introduction of Poopdeck Pappy; Popeye’s absent father who is often portrayed to be a big ol’ jerk and couldn’t care less about his son when they first meet. Tons of story potential there, especially when you throw in super powered anime fights, but we don’t have time for any of that, so everything is just fine between them, and they even sanitize his backstory so that he didn’t straight up abandon his son. It seems the only conflicts the book is interested in are the ones that can be solved with punching and overly long exposition, but that by itself can’t hold up an entire story.
Thankfully, the action is still top-notch as Popeye is forced to face another random fighter, this time sent by whomever the big-bad of the story is, and there’s at least an interesting development here where the Sea Hag is forming an uneasy alliance with Popeye and his allies. While Popeye is fighting for his life against some dude who looks like a cross between Galactus and Judge Dreed, the Sea Hag gives Olive Oyl a magic wand and Bluto these awesome looking shield gauntlets to even the odds. This is finally pointing us towards something interesting for the next issue, and maybe it’ll be enough to see these three working together to carry it through to the end. It’d at least give them a chance to bounce off of each other and perhaps work through some interpersonal issues while punching bad guys in the face, which is usually the best we can ask for when it comes to this type of action anime.
I may not be the biggest fan of Shonen style anime, but as a guy who likes both Popeye cartoons and Dragon Ball Z, I’m probably the perfect target audience for something like this. Unfortunately, it feels a little too calculated trying to fit that description, and the short amount of time they have to tell this story means that they had to cut corners around the stuff that I feel would have made for a much more interesting story. I want a series that takes inspiration from Shonen anime to become its own thing, and this just doesn’t do that. It feels like we’re sacrificing much of what made Popeye such an endearing character in the first place to make a One Piece knock-off, and while I suppose it’s understandable to lean so heavy on the new stuff as Popeye’s relevance is almost nonexistence these days, it’s no less disappointing for those who bought a Popeye book because they like Popeye. Still, even if we divorce this book from the franchise it’s pulling from and simply look at it as its own thing, it feels far too rush; as if we’ve skipped over the best seasons of a TV show and are picking it up around season 5 when the ideas are running a bit thin, and they pump up the action to compensate. If the sales on this are strong enough then perhaps we will get a proper book and, I’ll actually get everything I wanted out of the story, but as it exists today, it’s getting harder to look at this as more than just a gimmick.
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