Popeye
The Wilco/Popeye crossover you wish you’d demanded
This Sunday’s Popeye comic strip by Frank Caruso and Ned Sonntag featured the band Wilco joining the regular Popeye cast in handing out Wilco-brand spinach. The band’s guest appearance was just part one of the crossover, however, as Wilco’s latest video features the band jamming with Popeye, Wimpy and the rest, with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy providing a third potential suitor for the ever-popular Olive Oyl.
The song, “Dawned On Me,” is from the band’s album The Whole Love, and the video is directed by Darren Romanelli, who conceived the collaboration between Wilco and King Features for the band’s first video since 1999. No doubt a cover of “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” can’t be too far away.
- January 25, 2012 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Talking Comics with Tim | Ben Towle
Oyster War Tumblr
On any given week, reading Ben Towle’s Twitter feed or Oyster War Tumblr or his blog, I tend to take away some perspective of substance. And that’s what prompted me to do this email interview with him. Rather than explain what ground we tried to cover, I prefer to jump right into the interview, after thanking Towle for his time and thoughts. This interview was conducted prior to Towle’s Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean being nominated in the Eisner Best Publication for Kids category.
Tim O’Shea: When you started on Oyster War, did you expect that “publishers [would not]… be beating down my door to publish this weird, not-all-ages mashup of 20s newspaper comic strips and obscure (at least in the U.S.) French graphic novels“? Or has that been an unexpected, disappointing surprise?
Ben Towle: As far as my statement about publishers goes, I should clarify: no big publishing house is beating down my door to give me a publishing deal with a decent advance. And no, this doesn’t surprise me at all.
I guess I’ve gotten a reputation as a naysayer as a result, but I’ve always been quite dubious of the (in my opinion, very Pollyanna-ish) claim that the graphic novel as a literary/art form has “arrived.” I think if you look at what GNs for adults have gotten deals from big publishers, they’re almost exclusively very specific genres—usually memoir with some sort of an angle (historical, grave illness, identity politics, etc.)—-and that’s not the sort of thing I’m personally interested in doing comics about.
That said, I’m optimistic that once Oyster War gets to the point that it’s, say, 75% complete I’ll be able to shop it around to a specialty graphic novels publisher and find it a home. It would be nice if we got to the point that there’s a sizable enough audience for adult general fiction graphic novels to sustain the “living from advance to advance” model that successful prose authors can pull off, but until then, I’ll just continue to do what I’ve been doing: produce the work that I love doing and which I truly believe in, and hope to find some success with those projects on the back end.
- April 25, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tim O'Shea
What Are You Reading?
Stumptown
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? This week’s guest is Alex Segura, executive director of publicity and marketing at Archie Comics. But we’ll always know him as the guy who founded The Great Curve, the blog that would one day morph into Robot 6.
To see what Alex and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below …
- April 3, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Joe the Barbarian #8
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy on Wednesday based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on what we call our “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList if you’d like to play along in our comments section.
Chris Arrant
$15:
This week’s a big week for me, so with only $15 I’d have to leave a lot of things back and make some hard choices. My five under $15 would start with Joe The Barbarian #8 (DC/Vertigo, $3.99) by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy. I’m a big fan of both guys, but I have to admit the story went over my head the same way The Filth did in serialization. Be that as it may, I’ve kept buying the issues just to amaze myself with Murphy’s art. Now that the complete series is out, I’ll re-read it all in one sitting and hope for the best. Second would be the fourth issue of Incognito: Bad Influences (Marvel/Icon, $3.50) because, well, Brubaker and Phillips can do no wrong. After that I’d get Secret Warriors #25 (Marvel, $3.99) because Hickman’s writing here plays up to all the things I like — espionage, secrets, and overly-complicated story arcs. Over on the DC side I would pick up Brightest Day #21 (DC, $2.99). This series has ebbed and flowed for me, depending on which story arcs are brought to the fore in each issue… but I’m excited to see what happens and that’s what it should be about, right? My last pick is a cheat — I only have some change left, but thankfully the Fear Itself Sketchbook (Marvel) coming out is a free promotional item. I’ll take Stuart Immonen sketches any day!
- March 1, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by JK Parkin
What Are You Reading?
Kill Shakespeare
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? Today’s special guests are Johnny Zito and Tony Trov, writers of Black Cherry Bombshells, Moon Girl, Lamorte Sisters and D.O.G.S. of Mars.
To see what Tony, Johnny and the Robot 6 crew are reading, click the link below.
- January 30, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | Tom Neely mangles Popeye in Doppelgänger
Alt-horror visionary Tom Neely — he of the much acclaimed, mostly wordless graphic novel The Blot — is at it again with another psychologically troubling take on the cartoon icons of the early 20th century. This time he’s putting Popeye through the paces in Doppelgänger, an action-packed reinterpretation of E.C. Segar’s sailor man. The book pits Popeye against his greatest enemy of all: himself. Multiple copies, in fact. It’s not Neely’s most overtly horrific work, to be sure, but doubles have been a staple of the uncanny for centuries (as Freud himself noted), and the scenes of Popeye and his duplicates assaulting one another evoke everything from Dead Ringers to 28 Days Later, all with impeccable linework that recalls the great master cartoonists of yore. You can order it through Neely’s I Will Destroy You imprint. Tastier than spinach and twice as good for you, folks!
- October 26, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Sean T. Collins
Straight for the art | Cool old magazine covers
Popeye as you have never seen him before
I’m not sure why exactly Stephen Kroninger decided to post a bunch of magazine covers from the 1970s and 80s, but they’re fun to look at, and there are some old friends here like Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. That Popeye cover alone was worth the click for me. (Found via Journalista.)
- May 4, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
What are you reading?
Nana Vol. 1
Welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, our weekly look at the comics, graphic novels, books and whatever else the Robot 6 is reading. This week our special guest is Laura Hudson, editor of the Eisner-nominated site ComicsAlliance and former editor of the Eisner-nominated magazine Comics Foundry.
To see what Laura and the rest of the Robot 6 folks are reading, click the link below.
- April 18, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Straight for the art | Bobby Timony’s Popeye pitch
Popeye by Bobby Timony
Bobby Timony, co-creator of the Zuda strip Night Owls, shares some artwork for a Popeye pitch he created some years back, featuring Popeye and a 10-year-old Swee’ Pea going on a treasure hunt. There’s also a giant robot, which is always a bonus in my book.
- March 25, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
Google celebrates Popeye creator E.C. Segar
Popeye Google Doodle
Google celebrates comics again today with a Doodle on its homepage marking what would’ve been the 115th birthday of Popeye creator E.C. Segar.
Born on Dec. 8, 1894, in Chester, Illinois, Elzie Crisler Segar worked as a drummer and film projectionist at a local theater while taking a correspondence course in cartooning. He eventually moved to Chicago, and was hired by the Chicago Herlad, which in March 1916 published Segar’s first (but short-lived) comic strip, Charlie Chaplin’s Comedy Capers.
After media mogul William Randolph Hearst bought and closed the Herald, Segar was sent to King Feature Syndicate in New York City, where he created Thimble Theatre, a strip starring a coy flapper named Olive Oyl, her fiance Harold Hamgravy and various members of the Oyl family.
- December 8, 2009 @ 05:03 AM by Kevin Melrose
Straight for the art | Popeye by RaphaelB
Apropos of the Popeye/Namor mash-up that JK posted the other day, here’s another version of the squinty-eyed sailor by French artist RaphaelB. According to the Ephemerist, this is part of a Popeye art book that Les Editions Charrette will be publishing. Any chance it will come stateside?
- September 17, 2009 @ 08:58 AM by Chris Mautner
Straight for the art | Popeye vs. Namor
Let’s hope he gobbled down some spinach right before this … Evan “Doc” Shaner and Jay Fosgitt draw a clash between two titans, as Popeye and Namor prepare for conflict.
- September 15, 2009 @ 08:42 AM by JK Parkin
Six by 6 | Six comics that made us cry
Tom Strong #36
This week Chris Mautner suggested we share our softer sides and each talk about three comics that broke down our tough-guy exteriors and made us openly weep as we turned the pages. It’s a risky venture, to be sure; to some members of our audience, this will destroy the “manly man” image we’ve worked so hard to build up on the blog, but for others, it will show there’s more to who we are than just bad jokes and Shelf Porn.
So here they are — six comics that made us cry. After reading our selections, be sure to grab a tissue and tell us what comics made you cry as well.
1. “We’re brothers, Tom”
I always thought Tom Strong was the weakest of Alan Moore’s ABC line (in fact I said so rather openly in issue #231 of The Comics Journal). Oh sure, there were lots of colorful dialogue and zany plots, but I felt the series was sorely lacking in gravitas. The characters seemed too thinly sketched to me and I couldn’t find myself forming enough of an emotional commitment to them to care about what happened to them. It kept hinting that there was a lot more going on under the surface, but that’s all it would do, hint.
That was until the final issue, no. 36, where, during the “end of the world as we know it” created by Promethea, Tom is confronted by the ghost of his arch-enemy Paul Saveen, who reveals that he is, in fact, Tom’s half-brother. What follows is one of the most tender scenes I’ve ever read in a superhero book (“Jesus Paul” Tom says, breaking down “We tried to kill each other.”) When, two pages later, Tom introduces Saveen to a passerby with a simple “This is my brother. This is my brother Paul” well, I just lose it. –Chris Mautner
- June 21, 2009 @ 10:52 AM by JK Parkin
Not comics: I Dream of Popeye
How many times has this happened to you? You’re getting ready to go to the local Popeye convention, but can’t find a thing to wear? Good thing this guy has his own genie. (Found via Flog)
- May 7, 2009 @ 01:32 PM by Chris Mautner