Quick Reviews: Popeye Volume 1: I Yam What I Yam and Shadowlands

We are living at the beginning of a new golden age of classic comic strip reprints, it seems, and this latest salvo from Fantagraphics is among the best of the lot. This first volume collecting E.C. Segar’s Popeye material in Thimble Theater covers the years 1928-1930 in a way that allows them to use the book’s tall format to great effect: each page features a week of the Daily strips, with the Sunday strips (which carried their own storyline) occupying the back section. It’s hard to find enough superlatives to describe this presentation – Popeye is a long-neglected comic strip icon and this unique-looking deluxe volume is what the character deserves. Now, about starting a proper Terry And The Pirates reprint project, along with getting the complete Sky Masters into my hands…

Kim Deitch‘s hallucinogenic tale of a crashed alien ship, its discovery by a 7-year-old boy named Al Ledicker, and the carnival that springs up around it has always been one of the harder things to collect from the creator of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, as it was scattered through multiple magazines and comics. This collection of stories covers a broad swathe of Americana from the late 19th century until the end of the 20th, and Deitch’s retro-creepy-cute art is perfect for the subjects at hand. If you don’t mind a dash of murder, a drop or two of incest, and tragic tales of flying pigs, then picking this up would probably be in your best interest.

Copies of these books were provided by Fantagraphics for the purposes of review.