E.C.Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theater ran for 10 years before Popeye ever showed up. Olive’s main boyfriend was Ham Gravy. AFAIK, there are few reprints of prePopeye TT. Fantagraphics has a great set of Popeye reprints, but just a little of prePopeye leading up to his arrival. Lately I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out where I read a pretty long Ham and Olive sequence. One of the stories had Ham seeing a rich older woman who always wore sunglasses, and Ham’s attempts to find out how old she was. Olive went crazy and was swinging from the chandelier and biting Ham’s nose, thinking in her delirium it was a hot dog. I can’t figure out where I read this. There is a recent Sunday prePopeye book, but the strips I’m thinking of were dailies.I’m appealing to the early comic strip affectianados among us.
Paging @Little_Nemo…
IIRC, @Colibri is no slouch, either.
Bud Sagendorf drew Popeye strips from 1956 to 1986. In 1986, he stopped doing daily strip and only did the Sunday color strip until 1994. Hy Eisman took over the Sunday strips in 1994 and is still doing them (which is impressive because he’s 94).
Bobby London took over doing the daily strips in 1986 and did them until his abrupt departure from the strip in 1992. When London left, the syndicate just started reprinting old Sagendorf strips.
So a daily strip you may have seen in a newspaper recently could have been originally published fifty years ago.
It’s definitely Segar pre-Popeye. It was a whole sequence, and they could go on forever, so it wasn’t just an excerpt in an enthusiast compilation.
I’d love to see those dailies. Segar is conspicuously absent from Digital Comic Museum except for some stuff in a Charlie Chaplin book.
Then I don’t know. I’m not aware of any newspaper that is running old Segar Popeye strips. Pre-Popeye means these strips are around a hundred years old.
Thimble Theater with Popeye has been completely reprinted at least twice. The 10 years of Thimble Theater before Popeye is pretty much untouched. There is a big book of some of the Sundays but I think that’s about it.
The same Bobby London that did “Dirty Duck”?
Yes
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Maybe I misread your question. I thought you were saying you read this story as a series of dailies in a newspaper. It appears I misunderstood this and you read them in a book collection of previously published dailies. Is that correct?
If this is the case, you probably were reading one of the volumes that Fantagraphic published in the eighties. They did an eleven volume set reprinting all of Segar’s daily strips; The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye.
I had all those eighties reprints and now have the current 6 volume hb set. Except for the first story, leading up to the introduction of Popeye, there is no earlier stuff. I’m looking for a reprinting of a story in Thimble Theater before Popeye. I don’t know where I read it, probably in a book along with other ancient strips.
I’m being really dense today. Okay, you said you were looking for the pre-Popeye daily strips and obviously The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye isn’t that (the series covers the dailies starting in 1930).
There’s Thimble Theatre and the pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar, which was published in 2018, but that’s probably the book you referred to in the OP. It’s reprints of Sunday strips not dailies.
There was also a series titled Thimble Theatre Presents published by Comics Stars in the World back in the seventies. This included pre-Popeye strips but I believe it was also just reprints of Sunday strips.
Here’s 11 pages from 1919:
A while back, in a book, I read a sequence of Thimble Theater daily strips which were from the years preceding Popeye. It was an Olive Oyl/ Ham Gravy story. I’m trying to remember where I read that story. It was probably in a collection book, similar to the Smithsonian book, along with a bunch of other old strips.
The story I’m looking for wasn’t that old. Olive and Ham were in the form they assumed for the rest of the run of the strip, if you know what I mean.
I don’t think the dailies you described would be as far back as 1919. My understanding is that Segar didn’t start doing multi-strip story arcs until around 1922.
If I was to guess, I’d say the strips I’m looking for were maybe 1925- 1929. Dailies.
I vaughly remember reading a fairly long Thimble Theatre sequence involving Olive Oyl’s brother. Unfortunately I’ve read so many reprints that I’m not sure where I saw it. Nemo Magazine did a series of obscure comic reprints. Maybe there?
I believe most of the prePopeye stories involved Olive’s brother Castor. Ham Gravy was her nominal boyfriend.
I had a bunch of Nemos at one time. That could very well be the answer.