What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who is Patcheye and why should we care? June – September 2023

Among the characters brought back to Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s twice-a-week Olive and Popeye comic is Patcheye. Patcheye is a pirate ghost, introduced by Bud Sagendorf into the comic book back in 1963. Bud Sagendorf imported Patcheye into the main strip in a 1971 story. Comics Kingdom conveniently reran the whole story again late last year/early this year. So it’s easy to catch the whole thing if you want to read it yourself and have a subscription.

Patcheye’s deal is that the ghost of Popeye’s great-great-great-gran’pappy, waiting for a boy in the family to want to be a pirate. Swee’Pea declared that wish and so we got a couple weeks of Patcheye training Swee’Pea into piracy. Patcheye puts together a crew of Swee’Pea and Olive Oyl and in a rowboat takes on a battleship. It then becomes a story of getting Swee’Pea out of jail on the piracy charge. Patcheye then disappears from the story, returning only to leave in disgust when Swee’Pea is spanked as a naughty little boy instead of hung as a pirate. An underwhelming use of a neat idea? That’s the Thimble Theatre Plot Promise.

So this should catch you up to mid-September 2023 in Popeye’s comic strip adventures. Most of the action is in Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s twice-a-week Olive and Popeye. I guess I’m doing a follow-up to this around December 2023, that’ll someday be at this link. If all goes well. Until then, here’s what has gone on.

Olive and Popeye.

20 June – 12 September 2023.

Last time, in the Shadia Amin Olive-focused side of the strip, Olive Oyl and Petunia (Whaler Joe’s daughter) were spelunking in the Soulful Cave. (Whaler Joe is the guy who raised Popeye after Poopdeck fled and Popeye’s Mom, Irene, was lost at sea.) But Olive Oyl got attacked by a giant leech, and Petunia pulled her body out. Her dead body.

Luckily, as Linden (the Sea Hag’s intern) explains over the phone, it’s the Soul Full cave. It’s chock full of all kinds of soul and soul-location-management tools. Petunia’s able to find an altar of some kind that puts Olive’s soul back in … well, Petunia’s body. But Olive Oyl’s able to get this sorted out fast.

Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye for the 25th of July, 2023. Amin’s page here. Much of the story has been in a lighthearted, bouncy tone for stuff about death and unquiet ghosts and all that. (For example, Olive Oyl gets back in her right body by threatening the Soul Altar Or Whatever with a hammer.) This is one of the quieter panels and unusually affecting. A bit of this sells the whole drama.

But not without a change. Olive Oyl can see the spirits of the dead around her. Not just the ones who won’t shut up being around, like Patcheye. She decides she needs to convey messages from lost souls to the living. And she puts together a gang to sail around Sweethaven and take care of this. Mae as bodyguard, Sutra as the person who knows Linden in case of annoying occult business, Petunia as marine biologist, Cylinda Oyl as assistant. (Cylinda Oil had been Castor Oyl’s wife but was written out of the strip in 1928, that is, before Popeye was introduced to it.)

---

On the Popeye side of things, there’s also an expedition going together. It has a less clear purpose. Mostly, Whaler Joe has been missing the sea, despite the pleasantness of Sweethaven and being with Popeye again. So they’re setting out on a little journey to see Sir Pomeroy, 10th Earl of Vauxhall, who I never heard of before this either. Turns out that apart from a guest appearance in the Bobby London era, he’s been out of Popeye since writer Ralph Stein left the strip in August 1959. He apparently was a British explorer with exaggerated mannerisms, which I’m sure hasn’t dated one bit since the end of the Anti-British National Liberation War/Malayan Emergency.

That’s the big development. The rest of the Popeye side of the strip has been about roping all of the sailor man’s family into a bunch that’s staying at Sweethaven. This includes Poopdeck Pappy, and Pappy’s mother, Popeye’s mother Irene, Popeye’s aunt Agnes Jones. Maybe even Agnes’s husband, Davy Jones, the spirit of the sea.

And in the main, Sunday-only Thimble Theatre Presents Popeye strip? Nothing much. Some fun one-off gags, with a nice mix of characters we know well and characters we haven’t seen since Herbert Hoover was President. Even an appearance by the long-forgotten Other Katzenjammer Kid. So that’s all fun but nothing that doesn’t explain itself. Except that a bunch of the Sundays have featured the wealthy Mr Kilph, last seen in the 1930s. He started as a philanthropist setting up Popeye boxing matches. He mutated into a villain setting up Popeye boxing matches, possibly because Elzie Segar forgot what Kilph’s deal was. Or because rich villains are fun to write and fun to beat. I don’t have any way of knowing whether Milholland is planning to go somewhere with this, but we’ve seen he is willing to do stories in the mother strip.

Next Week!

Who yanked out the plug at the center of the galaxy so everything could drain into the black hole? And how will Doc Wonmug, Alley Oop, and Ooola avoid responsibility for it? Also: hey, how about a trip to Creepy Animate Plant Island and some moss that makes you immortal but really fast? It’s time to look at Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop if the spacetime continuum doesn’t get all broken yet again.