‘Ja Think I'm a Cowboy?’: Popeye Sails Into the Funny Pages
On January 17, 1929, a squinting one-eyed sailor named Popeye walked into E. C. Segar's comic strip Thimble Theatre and stole the show — and the century.
"Ja think I'm a cowboy?" With that single wisecrack, delivered to a stranger on a dock, the most famous sailor in cartoon history walked into American life. The date was January 17, 1929. The sailor was Popeye. And his creator, E. C. Segar, had no idea what he had just unleashed.
Popeye debuted as a bit player in Thimble Theatre, a comic strip Segar had been drawing for the King Features Syndicate since December 1919. The strip's stars were Olive Oyl, her brother Castor Oyl and Olive's boyfriend Ham Gravy. In the storyline running that January, Castor and Ham needed a mariner to sail them to Dice Island, so they hired a squinting, pipe-smoking, one-eyed sailor off the docks. He was supposed to appear for a few weeks and then disappear.
Readers had other ideas. Letters poured in demanding more of the sailor, and Segar — a practical Midwesterner born in Chester, Illinois — listened. Popeye muscled his way to the center of the strip, won Olive Oyl's heart, and gathered an immortal supporting cast: the hamburger-obsessed J. Wellington Wimpy, the infant Swee'Pea, the villainous Bluto and the Sea Hag. Within a few years, Thimble Theatre was, for all practical purposes, the Popeye show.
In 1933, Max Fleischer's studio turned the strip into a series of theatrical cartoons for Paramount, and "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man" — with music by Sammy Lerner — became one of the most recognizable tunes on Earth. It was the cartoons that made spinach Popeye's signature fuel, and the effect on real life was astonishing: American spinach growers credited the sailor with a 33 percent jump in U.S. spinach consumption between 1931 and 1936, and in 1937 the self-declared "Spinach Capital of the World," Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue honoring Segar and his sailor — the first public sculpture ever raised to a cartoon character.
Segar did not live to see the full extent of his creation's fame. He died in 1938 at just 43, and his assistant Bud Sagendorf carried the strip forward for decades. The tributes piled up anyway: Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, called Popeye "a perfect comic strip, consistent in drawing and humor." A live-action film directed by Robert Altman and starring Robin Williams followed in 1980.
Popeye endures because he was never supposed to. He was a walk-on who stole the show — proof that audiences, not authors, get the final vote on which characters live forever. Every breakout supporting character since is walking a dock that a one-eyed sailor walked first, on January 17, 1929.
Image: Popeye's first appearance, in the Thimble Theatre strip published January 17, 1929 — drawn by E. C. Segar, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
