{"id":548,"date":"2006-11-20T11:11:39","date_gmt":"2006-11-20T15:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=548"},"modified":"2006-11-20T11:12:51","modified_gmt":"2006-11-20T15:12:51","slug":"you-heard-of-this-guy-segar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=548","title":{"rendered":"You Heard of this Guy Segar?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fantagraphics.com\/\">Fantagraphics Books<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Fantagraphics\u2019 Popeye will collect the complete run of Segar\u2019s Thimble Theatre comic strip (dailies and color Sundays) featuring Popeye, re-establishing Segar as one of the first rank of cartoonists who have elevated the comic strip to art. He was the most popular cartoonist of his day, his sense of humor coming straight out of Mark Twain, who also balanced exaggerated tall tales and a perfect ear for everyday speech with dark themes that undercut his laugh-out-loud stories. In this first volume, covering 1928-1930, Popeye\u2019s initial courtship of Olive Oyl takes center stage while Olive\u2019s brother Castor Oyl discovers the mysterious Whiffle Hen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As mentioned in previous posts, I&#8217;m really excited about this new collection of E.C. Segar&#8217;s <em>Thimble Theater<\/em>&#8211;AKA <em>Popeye<\/em>&#8211;reprints.  I was checking out Fantagraphics (the publisher) site and a portion of this summary blurb about the book struck me as odd: &#8220;&#8230;<span class=\"p_bookCopy\">re-establishing Segar as one of the first rank of cartoonists who have elevated the comic strip to art.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s with the &#8220;re-establishing?&#8221;  Is Segar currently <em>not<\/em> &#8220;one of the first rank&#8221; of cartoonists&#8230;ever?  If he&#8217;s not, when did he stop being?  I consider Segar to be about the best the comics art form&#8217;s ever produced, and while I understand that&#8217;s an arguable point, I&#8217;m hard pressed to think of more than maybe five or six others that could seriously be considered to be better.<\/p>\n<p>While it&#8217;s not unusual for a book solicitation blurb to feature a bit of hyperbole in the interest of drumming up sales, positing that as major a figure as E.C. Segar has somehow fallen into an obscurity, from which this reprint will rescue him seems pretty silly to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fantagraphics Books Fantagraphics\u2019 Popeye will collect the complete run of Segar\u2019s Thimble Theatre comic strip (dailies and color Sundays) featuring Popeye, re-establishing Segar as one of the first rank of cartoonists who have elevated the comic strip to art. He was the most popular cartoonist of his day, his sense of humor coming straight out &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=548\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[45],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-8Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}