For years Popeye was best known for the newspaper strip drawn by Bud Sagendorf. Comic strip historians had to stress their relative unimportance to make people aware of the beauty of the original version by Elsie Segar. Then Craig Yoe helped us rediscover Sagendorf by publishing a book with his comic book work from the fortie and fifties (stressing the point that Sagendorf started out as an assistant of Segar and had lost his rightfull place as his successor by syndicate shenanigans. And indeed the comic book version is great to look at and very much in the spirit of the old Popeye. The book spawned a comic book series from IDW, which in turn has led to a succesfull series of book reprints of the comic books. But now it is time to rediscover the early newspaper years of Segar. As with most strips that died down and we homogenized in the seventies and eighties, the early years are much more exciting. Sagendorf started doing the newspaper strip in Augustus 1959 and the Sunday in September of the same year. Here are some of his Sundays in color which I scanned from my own collection.
2 comments:
Another strip that needs to be reprinted. Fantagraphics did a beautiful job with the Segar material, now they should do one on Sagendorf's Sundays as well (I'm a less fan of his dailies).
Or Craig could start using them in the comics as fillers as a lead-in to a IDW book. I have kept raw scans for him of all my pages (selected Sundays until 1963). So there's more to come.
Post a Comment