Popeye the sailor man first appeared as a secondary character ten years into the run of E. C. Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theatre, which offered up parodies of dumb Hollywood movies.  Almost instantly, however, he took over the strip.  Violent, indestructible and bound by his own code of rough honor, he was irascible but dependable — the perfect protagonist for the wacky adventure strip Thimble Theatre turned into.

The strip featured surreal and whimsical fantasy elements and regular episodes of wild anarchic action, with Popeye inevitably having to beat the bejesus out of some villain or other.

The whole thing is eccentric, sui generis — and one of the most inventive and entertaining of all comic strips.  Popeye got toned down as a character in the animated cartoons he eventually starred in, and in the incarnations of the comic strip after Segar’s untimely death at the age of 43.  The character created by Segar remains a true American original, though — a brawling pigheaded palooka with a heart of gold.

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The legendary Alex Raymond made his name drawing the sci-fi fantasy comic strip Flash Gordon but went on to create several other important strips, including his last one, Rip Kirby, featuring a private detective in post-WWII New York.  Raymond was primarily an artist collaborating with writers who supplied his plots and dialogue, but he was a brilliant artist, with a clean, bold, dynamic style that influenced many comic strip artists of later generations.  George Lucas has said that Raymond’s Flash Gordon was a primary influence on the Star Wars films.

For Rip Kirby, Raymond employed a naturalistic style and dynamically composed panels that have a film noir feel to them.  The strip is fast-moving and suspenseful and very entertaining.  IDW Publishing is in the process of issuing reprints of the complete run of the strip in multiple volumes.  It’s well worth a look.

For many years — 45 to be exact — Floyd Gottfredson drew the Disney Mickey Mouse comic strips for newspapers, often then collected in books.  They generally, except at the end of the strip’s run, involved extended adventure tales.

Gottfedson didn’t have the genius of Carl Barks, who drew the Donald Duck comic books for Disney, and he had a series of collaborators on the strips over the years, various inkers and dialogue writers who came and went, but his was the presiding vision.  He was a fine artist and visual storyteller, and the Mickey strips are very entertaining.

Fantagraphics Books is in the process of reprinting the complete run of them.  Sadly, the strips in the Fantagraphics books are printed too small.  Gottfredson often drew very busy panels and crammed a lot of text into description boxes and dialogue balloons.  Some of the panels in the Fantagraphics volumes can’t be deciphered without a magnifying glass.

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This is a very unusual comic strip — it features a plucky young girl as it’s protagonist.  She is, of course, an orphan who at the start leads a hard-luck life in an orphanage run by a mean matron who tries to instill in her charges the idea that they are second-class human beings.

Annie suffers her hardships with stoic good grace but never accepts second-class status — she believes in herself, is willing to stick up for herself, is capable of defending herself and others if they’re physically assaulted, and has an unshakeable spirit of personal honor and generosity.

Although the strip began in the mid 1920s, Annie would in time come to be seen as the personification of the decency and grit that got America through the Great Depression, and she is certainly one of the most powerful female icons in all of American art, a successor to Dorothy Gale and precursor to Velvet Brown.

I’m still working my way through the early years of the strip, which concentrate on Annie’s Dickensian travails as an orphan.  Eventually she will find a powerful mentor and patron in Daddy Warbucks and go off on exotic adventures, carrying her heroic virtues into the wide world.

Heroic as she is, however, she’s also unassuming and funny, with a wry perspective on things, a distinctly American sort of hero — but always a girl to keep your eye on, a girl to rely on when the going gets tough.

Carl Barks didn’t actually appear in the funny papers — he drew comic books — but he is one of the finest of all comic strip artists.

His style of visual narrative is deceptively simple.  His panels rarely draw attention to themselves — they’re well-crafted but straightforward — and yet his stories pop from frame to frame, with a speed and economy that are thrilling.  You might call him the Howard Hawks of comic strip artists, with a technique so masterful that it disappears in the beguilements of the tale.

Barks’s humor is gentle, more amusing and charming than funny, but the sweetness draws you into his adventure plots with Donald and his nephews and his Uncle Scrooge in an oddly powerful way.  His is a cozy and consoling art, pleasurable in ways that seem to bypass the conscious mind and return you to the innocent diversions of childhood, like pretending to be a jungle explorer in the blackberry thickets down by the river.

It’s art of a very high order.

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