Bud Sagendorf

Nobody ever really got Popeye just right after EC Segar died. But Bud Sagendorf got it pretty close. But to be fair to any artists who followed Segar, I don't think that Segar himself would have been able to get Popeye right either even if he had lived. There was a lot going against both Popeye and Segar himself.

Namely the ever ominous form of William Randolph Hearst. According to the book Popeye: The First Fifty Years, Bud Sagendorf who had been Segar's assistant on the Popeye strips for many years recounts how Hearst demanded: "Popeye is loved by the children of America... Stop his swearing... Stop his brutality... Make him respectable".

Segar was furious and was quoted in saying "The fun will be gone. There's nothing funny about a sissy sailor!"

What makes all this worse, W.R. Hearst was a complete hypocrite. One one hand here he was acting like some shining night for morality and decency in America. He was also the person who started the smear campaign against marijuana.

But on the other hand, he was having an opened affair with actress Marion Davies while married to his wife Millicent.

So, a foul-mouthed sailor who occasionally punched a horse and people smoking marijuana for recreational use was highly immoral. But cheating on your wife is completely fine.

Not that I endorse the legalization of marijuana in any way. I'm just saying it smacks of hypocrisy to me. However, what Hearst doesn't mention is the fact that his campaign demonizing marijuana has really nothing to do with a moral issue. But the fact that people smoking it for recreational use cut into the hemp crop which he used to make his newspapers with.

Again, someone in power who is no better than a schoolyard bully. But I digress...



Nobody has really captured the spirit of the original Popeye strips since Segar's death in 1938. However, Bud Sangedorf's long run with the character is a definite close second.

The stories in Sangedorf's strips don't have that charm of the Segar strips. Segar was the master of creating these ongoing stories that borderline surreal. But those years as Segar's assistant do help him out with his approach to the character. The stories in the Sagendorf Popeye are more along the lines of the one-liner gags that newspaper strips have fallen into over the years.

Most comic strips seem to fall into the same formula. First Panel: setting up the joke. Second (and occasionally Third) Panel: Filler. Third (and occasionally Fourth) Panel: The Punchline.

And for the most part, even though it wasn't the same Popeye as Segar's, Sagendorf remained truer to the character than any of the animations created by Famous Studio, King Feature and Hanna-Barbera. Although, HB seemed to use a very watered-down version of Sagendorf's Popeye for their Saturday Morning Cartoon series.

I have a fondness for Sagendorf's character design for Popeye and the Thimble Theater cast primarily because that was my first introduction to the one-eyed (and thanks to the crappy Famous Studio character design occasionally two-eyed) sailor.

It was Sagendorf's character design of Popeye that adorned my lunchbox in kindergarten. I was constantly trying to copy the images on that lunchbox when I would draw Popeye, Olive, Wimpy and Bluto (sometimes called Brutus).


There is a great book I picked up at Worcester's one and only Pop Culture Emporium That's Entertainment called Popeye: The First Fifty Years. It's not a bad book loaded with Sagendorf's interpretations of Popeye and the rest of the cast as well as a few of Segar's original strips.

If you happen to find yourself an inexpensive copy I highly recommend you pick it up. It's particularly good if you have a child who loves to draw. The will have a great time trying to draw the characters in the book.