![]() “ Magical realism was invented in Latin America,” he adds, “but in my opinion, there’s a clear precedent in the comic.” They were survivors,” says Andrés Pérez, who between 20 translated Segar’s strips, and those of his successors Bud Sagendorf and Bobby London, into Spanish. He and the rest of the characters found clever ways to keep going, with strength and courage. Society needed to distract itself from the miseries of everyday life. “He was born in the interwar period and at the beginning of the Great Depression, a really difficult time that has some parallels to the present. A 1929 poster for ‘Popeye the Sailor.’ LMPC (LMPC via Getty Images) In an era marked by the absence of real-life heroes, Popeye won over working-class families immediately. Despite his crude, womanizing ways, the public fell in love with the character’s authenticity and his broken English. But after fans insisted, Segar resurrected the seafaring immigrant a few months later. His appearance was brief: the cartoonist had no qualms about killing him off. The character appeared when Castor and Ham Gravy hired him to sail a ship. But everything changed on January 17, 1929, when Segar introduced a minor character who would go onto eclipse the initial cast: a mysterious sailor with hypertrophied forearms, one missing eye and a corncob pipe perpetually stuck in his mouth. ![]() The melodrama-tinged satire didn’t enjoy great success at first. The strip focused on the humble Oyl family: Olive, her eccentric brother Castor, her fiancé Ham Gravy and her parents Nana and Cole. When on December 19, 1919, the first Thimble Theatre comic strip appeared in the New York Evening Journal, one of the circulars owned by William Randolph Hearst, no one, not even its author, cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar, could have predicted what was to come.
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