[ click'n'big | © King Features, scanned from Fantagraphics' Popeye vol 4 ]
This made me laugh aloud while I was pooping. I guess it’s just that funny to me to see a really tiny guy bopped with so little effort by a really big guy. Because I’m a bully at heart. The action’s counter to the reading flow (right to left, not left to right), and somehow that may have made it funnier to me. Something about how in the third panel, he’s just completely disappeared, with an X marking the spot where he was (we are on a pirate ship, after all). And then, it just seems like he’s been suspended in the air forever. He’s traveled so far that Popeye didn’t even see him get punched out. But Castor Oyl* being Castor Oyl, he’ll crack wise even as he flies over the deck with a black eye. I just can’t stop gushing. I think the action lines against the stark black somehow made it funner to me. And now that I’m looking again, do you think maybe he’s been sailing through the air so long that he’s unconscious in the fourth panel, and then come to again by the fifth?
I love Thimble Theater.**
*That’s Olive’s brother, and the erstwhile star of the strip.
**That was the name of the strip at the time.
