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Popeye as the Study in Gallantry

Sometimes comics, despite their manifest purpose of entertaining readers, attempt to edify along the way. We need not ascribe polemical intent from first design even if it seems, organically, to have developed in pieces with altogether different directions; sometimes the moral sensibilities of creators incline them the same way gravity inclines masses to attract.

As one example, the fundamental concept of the character Popeye, as defined and portrayed by Segar, his original creator has considerable appeal even after many misguided and failed attempts to interpret the character in a slightly slicker, slightly less blunt manner. The combination of fractured English, brute force, and plain thinking seemed, in the character's heyday, to strike a note with readers that, despite his manifold improbable characteristics, allowed them to relate.

Why, though, should this character speak to so many? Very few readers abused the vernacular as he did; probably none of them enjoyed the specific deformities that define his portrait; few suffer the distorted anatomy typical of his classical delineation; and his appeal did not owe to other defining, though irrelevant, attributes such as his seafaring background, his fear of witchcraft, or his obsessions about the benefits of spinach and buttermilk.

From a slow start as a colorful, but not particularly exemplary, character in "Thimble Theater," Popeye grew into a much larger role, abandoning, along the way, tendencies to lie, cheat, and steal (none of which, to his benefit, he seemed able to do well at all). The definition of Popeye - in the combination of all the aforementioned, as well as the deliberate omission of certain attributes of personality and character - might reach so many because, in its core, it attempts to define the minimal virtuous man: Popeye, as conceived in his first few years of comic strip appearances, may provide a model for gallantry.

Moral Insight v. Intelligence

People who think they know everything frequently miss the reality in front of their noses. While intelligent folk - and, of course, the ubiquitous pretenders to intelligence - might claim that their high-power brains guarantee them a superior perception of all matters, whether practical, aesthetic, political, or moral, we need only consider examples of men labeled "genius" who lacked very important and essential elements of human awareness, such as Hitler. Whatever intelligence this onetime dictator possessed, it did not seem to carry with it very much moral insight.

If an intelligent human being can know a great deal, nothing necessarily validates what he knows against some kind of moral barometer. In the absence of just such guiding principles, however, knowledge can become useless or even dangerous. Popeye shows, by example, what a man should know, in its most minimal form: He should know how to recognize good and bad so that he may make the right choices.

Popeye knows - though he seldom can explain precisely how he knows - a good man or a bad man, fairly reliably, on first sight. And, frequently, he reacts viscerally to this initial diagnosis; proactive rather than reactive, the ham-fisted sailor preemptively punishes misdeeds that may not have occurred yet.

Plain Speaking

Once one disentangled Popeye's spoken words from the horrendous orthography, invented pronunciation, and fractured grammar, one finds in the remnants a verbal style disinclined to euphemism, evasion, and tactful obfuscation.

Do not confuse this with a claim that Popeye never lied. In his earliest years, he frequently lied to claim credit for achievements, lied to perpetrate simple-minded scams destined to failure (such as rubbing the magical African escape hen's head for luck in shooting craps), and the like. However, his guaranteed failure in such deceptive endeavors represented, in itself, an object lesson about deception, and Popeye, subsequently, tended to truth by instinct.

Beauty, Style, and Other Ephemera

Popeye could never compete on a slate of traits that have little to do with character but frequently a great deal to do with social success. He had a face best left covered except on Hallowe'en. When he spoke, one could barely make out syllables for the sound of rules of grammar and diction collapsing beneath his verbal onslaught against rules commonly observed by people of quality. His clothing implied no particular style, and efforts to make Popeye over as a gentleman of discerning tastes consistently failed. He seldom owned two coins to rub together, and even lacked a tooth in his mouth.

The points where Popeye proved, by refined standards, wanting tended, in the long run, to represent traits that neither mattered nor endured, at least not where people apply the Good Samaritan test to others to define who qualifies as a brother. In the context of Popeye, the question might appear as "Who would you call your brother - the man who dresses well and uses perfect grammar, but leaves you to die in a gutter because he fears to get your blood on his tuxedo, or a human saddlebag of a sailor who carries you to the hospital?" In such straits, we seldom worry if a rescuer says "horshpittle."

Even wealth, which Popeye sought, seldom held him. His adventures occasionally brought him bags of gold, which he typically lost in a variety of ways, including tossing them overboard to rescue his ship from sinking. Where he did manage to get more than bus fare back home to civilization, he ultimately ended up giving everything away, sometimes to debt-ridden King Blozo, sometimes to "widdies and orfinks." For him, money might have its appeal, but not to the point of ignoring the big picture.

Dedication to Purpose

Popeye's model of virtuous manhood required a kind of relentlessness containing considerable courage and at least as much pure mule stubbornness. After all, once a man's better judgment told him what he should do, second thoughts and fears did little to aid him to his purpose. Instead, reflection represented a yielding to temptation and, for those less formidable, might actually threaten to undermine a man's purpose altogether.

Popeye had no social standing to risk, nor concern for his reputation, nor, generally, wealth. Therefore, his courage typically centered on a single thing Popeye did have to give away: his health, his pain, or his life. Though we need not believe that Segar ever intended some anachronistic piece like "The Strange Death of Popeye the Sailorman," we can nonetheless suspend disbelief long enough to assume that Popeye never knew that nothing on this earth could do him harm worse than a stomach ache.

Granted, Popeye frequently seemed to direct his impressive martial prowess towards violence for no obvious purpose, at least when we read his own explanations for his behavior. Claims like "I don't like his looks" served as his self-justifications in more than one case where, devoid of the kind of provocation that would serve well in keeping him out of jail, Popeye chose to bust some hapless onlooker in the jaw. Other times, his arguments seemed directed towards the defense of simple reputation. Nonetheless, in all cases, the larger context vindicated the impulsive behaviors that seemed to originate from whim but actually drew on a moral insight he could not always articulate.

The Sanctity of Human Life

Popeye never feared to beat someone - anyone - up. And this doesn't mean a silly little one-panel slap-fest; a beating from Popeye, in his heyday, stood well among the dedicated efforts of professional torturers in the developing world. Yet, as willing as he seemed to plant one ham-like fist in another's face until the target's face went all soft and floppy, as enthusiastic as Popeye might become while undoing all kinds of dental work, he consistently espoused principles which forbade the taking of human life.

A reader could tell that he meant it, too - in one example, Castor Oyl proposed to crack open a helpless villain's head after said rascal had filled Popeye's rib cage with so much lead that no one, least of all Popeye himself, expected the sailor to live. Nonetheless, Popeye forbade the understandable desire of his long-term companion Castor to open up another man's head with a convenient boulder to see what he might find inside.

Defending the Downtrodden

The concern for "widdies and orfinks" never moves far from Popeye's mind. Indeed, on the rare occasion when his adventures manage to set him up with enough money to retire and no longer need to seek strange foreign casinos, sinking islands, or exotic locations where brave men can haul in gold by the boatload, Popeye reliably ends up giving it all away, generally to the benefit of said "widdies and orfinks."

The Depression - a period when people went hungry, yet farmers couldn't make money raising food - shaped this aspect of Popeye's character. A modern, cynical view of need - often seen as a consequence of personal mismanagment of one's life rather than an actual lack of opportunity to make do - would, in this context, fail to convince for clearly empirical causes rather than ideological ones.

Providing the Model for the Hero

He didn't have movie-star looks. He didn't have a clever and detached way with ironical epigrams. He didn't wallow in wealth or dedicate his evenings to a never-ending stream of young and beautiful females eager to become his spouse. He didn't dress well or speak well, and, when forced to admit it, knew he suffered a kind of "horsh-faced" ugliness that, in a lesser man, could have rendered him unfit for civil company. Despite all this, however, Popeye managed to fulfill the role of the hero again and again.

Given his jack-hammer like fists and a general ability to defy death from a variety of sources, Popeye owned many of the attributes of the later superhero. However, the heroic aspects derive more from character and less from his abilities; even on those occasions when Popeye could do little owing to injury (he suffered the occasional broken arm and broken neck), he generally marched forward and ignored the odds, since a sense of rightness drove him on.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 217. Completed 04-FEB-2001.