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.
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