60s Popeye: Valley of the Goons, the rare cartoon where Popeye goes sailing

After a bit of Jack Kinney we get back to the comfortable grounds of Paramount. Once more we have story, direction, and production by Seymour Kneitel. This for 1960’s Valley of the Goons.

Considering his name Popeye doesn’t spend that much time at sea. Especially in the King Features shorts, where he got stuck in a boring suburban house. Here, he’s finally at sea — and even in a sailing ship! — but it took being shanghaied to get him there.

I like this one a lot. Not just because it has Goons, although that does help. It does a lot of things right, including getting Popeye on an adventure. It’s also a strongly-plotted adventure. Poachers hoping to make a fortune in goonskin shanghai Popeye, presumably because they need the extra muscle. Popeye, being a hero, isn’t having it. He breaks out of the brig and gives the Goons the spinach they need to kick the pirates out. And the spinach seeds so they won’t have to rely on him anymore. The story’s sensible, the motivations clear enough, and Popeye is resolutely heroic for it all.

As seems to happen, I wonder if this was a condensed version of a comic strip or comic book adventure. Neither the Popeye Wikia nor the IMDB suggest it was. And it’s unfair to say that because a story is coherent and entertaining it must come from somewhere else. There’s no reason Seymour Kneitel can’t write good stories. Still, a condensation would explain why Rough House isn’t suspicious when the Captain takes the knocked-out Popeye.

So anyway I hope your year is turning out productive like this.

We get introduced to Goon Valley as “A Backwards Country”, along with some jokes about things being done the wrong way around. Putting a mailbox in a letter, for example, or a mugger forcing cash on someone. (Who seems happy about it, too.) A serious critic might consider the colonialist implications of these pirates raiding a country explicitly labelled “backwards”. And being saved by the white guy coming in and defending them, and encouraging them to adopt his own techniques to fend off future incursions^[*]. Me, I’m considering: is this a ripoff of Bizarro? The character first appeared, in Superboy, in 1959, and was popular for good reasons. But he was a lone “backwards” figure. Bizarro’s world (Htrae) first appeared in April 1960, if Wikipedia doesn’t mislead me. It’s … conceivable that this was filling out a couple minutes of screen time with a Bizarro World riff. But I find coincidence is the more compelling explanation. It’s not a unique genius that would think of “what if everyday life, but backwards?” It must have antecedents.

The captain of the poachers isn’t a Brutus figure, although Jackson Beck does the voice. Beck also does Rough House’s voice, using a southern-fried accent I think is unique to this short.

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^[*] One might ask whether I’m trivializing a serious and worthwhile form of criticism by putting it to a disposable cartoon from the 60s. I don’t intend to trivialize, no. I argue, first, that we learn how to think seriously about things by first thinking lightly about things. Whether by shallow thoughts or by simple topics. If the text doesn’t have enough of a point of view to criticize, it’ll fall apart under examination, and it’s worth learning how to spot that, too. And some serious thinkers would agree that the pop-culture stuff shoveled into kids’ heads deserves examination. But, again, these are for real critics, as opposed to what I do around here.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is the Phantom punching terrorists? February – May 2020

I mean, if he’s not punching terrorists, he’s underachieving as a superhero. Anyway, this is a recap for three months’ worth of the weekday continuity for Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom. If you want to know about the separate Sunday continuity, my most recent recap of its plots are here. And all my plot recaps, Sunday and weekday, are at this link. If you’re reading this after about August 2020 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here, too.

The Phantom (Weekdays).

10 February – 2 May 2020.

The Phantom had busted up a Rhodian column that was messing around in Wambesi territory. Their goal: Chatu, The Python, who a decade ago was the big terrorist nemesis of The Phantom. From a Bangallan prison he orchestrated the apparent death and actual imprisonment of Diana Palmer Walker, the Phantom’s wife. Since then he’s been held by his Wambesi countryment in a secret jail. And now The Phantom was settling in for a serious talk with Chatu about the deal and what is with it.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 18th of February, 2020. Before leaving, The Phantom taunted the Python one last time by complimenting him on that cool milk snake tattoo.

The Phantom explains how he turned back the Rhodian column. Chatu says he doesn’t see why The Phantom is trying to mess with his head like that. As if the Ghost Who Walks would play head games. But it tells The Phantom that Chatu did not organize this breakout attempt. There’s no way to know how the Rhodians got word of Chatu’s secret prison, unless any Wambesi person said anything to any Rhodian person about it. Chatu taunts that he’ll kill Diana Walker yet, and The Phantom slugs him. Then heads home, along the way asking Babudan what was with his poking in around the corners of that last story. Babudan gives a noncommittal answer. And this wraps up the story.

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The 253rd daily-continuity story, Unfinished Business, began the 24th of February. The Phantom, riled up by punching The Python, heads to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he punches successor top terrorist The Nomad. … I figured this summary would run a bit longer, but that is the important stuff.

The Phantom snuck in to Guantanamo Bay and disguised himself as Commander Burford. Eric “The Nomad” Sahara acts familiar with The Commander. I’m not clear whether it’s The Nomad being all smug or whether we’re expected to believe that American intelligence agencies will partner with the worst people in the world as long as they’re right-wing enough. The Phantom talks about the woman who captured him, Heloise Walker. The Nomad had thought Heloise Walker a Bangallan intelligence agent, and takes this as a sign the Americans have captured her.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 7th of March, 2020. So this got me wondering if prisoners in CIA torture camps are ever given cigarettes, which is the sort of dumb thing that I wonder about instead of why we keep letting the CIA run torture camps.

Then The Phantom reveals that he’s not Commander Burford. He’d been using shadows and night as cover. Saying he wants The Nomad to know he’ll never be safe from him, he slugs the prisoner enough to break his jaw. He gloats that his daughter fought back against him. With The Nomad unconscious, The Phantom escapes to the fishing trawler he’d used as cover to get to Cuba. The action may seem pointless, but it turned out also to be dumb. Now it’s got The Nomad wondering why Heloise Walker matters to The Phantom.

Also, if you’re wondering how The Phantom could impersonate a lead interrogator at Guantanamo Bay at all? Burford had at least one interview up on YouTube. And then interrogated Burford at gunpoint, to get finer details. I cannot force you to believe this, but the text offers an explanation, and I find it within the bounds of superhero stories.

The story ended the 28th of March, with now both the major international terrorist figures of the past decade vowing revenge from prison on the women around Kit Walker. This seems good.

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Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 9th of April, 2020. [ * In the Malay tongue. I know, right? I was expecting Llongo too. ]

On the 30th of March the current story, The Llongo Forest, started. It’s the 254th daily-continuity story. The Phantom gets into a pickup hunt with some Llongo people. They’re looking for a poacher, someone who’s gone around shooting any animal he can find. Poachers are really Mark Trail’s thing. But Mark Trail is being drawn all weird and dealing with a possibly fictional forest fire. The Phantom has to step into the gap.

The poacher’s easy to find; just follow the trail of slaughtered animals. His guides are nervous, afraid of what the Llongo people will do. The Phantom’s friends know: their queen’s ordered them dead. The Phantom talks them into seeing if they can’t stop the poachers without so much bloodshed. They’re up for it. They sneak up on the poacher’s camp and clobber the guides. The poacher himself needs more coaxing, by having Devil, the Wolf Who Walks, poised to rip out his throat.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 28th of April, 2020. Also I’m wondering if this is just the one Forbidden Forest for the Llongo, or if there’s a bunch of Forbidden Forests, and if different tribes respect others’ forest-forbiddings. Like, they probably come to some agreements about the territories, right?

The Phantom checks out the poacher’s home movies. Turns out he had wounded a lion without killing it. That’s a problem, as a badly wounded lion might turn to hunting humans. The trail leads into a forbidden forest, which the Llongo warriors won’t venture into. All right. The Phantom puts the poacher and his guides in the Llongo’s care and recommends they be handed over to the Jungle Patrol. And resolves to go into the forbidden forest by himself to track down the wounded lion.

That’s where the story sits as the first full week of May begins.

Next Week!

I get a lightweight week as one of the two-or-maybe-three Sunday continuity strips gets its attention. Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant comes up next time, and we’ll see how my shifting the publication date to Tuesdays helps.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Will I ever stop complaining about the Comics Kingdom redesign? January – April 2019

I’m glad you want to know the happenings in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s Sunday-continuity The Phantom. If you’re reading this after about July 2019, this recap may be out of date. A more up-to-date recap should be at this link, as will be recaps of the weekday continuity. Also, The PhantomWiki is a nice handy reference for stuff. And the Comics Kingdom redesign has gotten less bad but I’m still not happy, and shall explain later.

The Phantom (Sundays).

27 January – 21 April 2019.

The Phantom Sunday continuity was partway through its flashback when I last checked in. He had returned a Xanangan child to her village. She was a stowaway on a vintage B-29. The plane’s crew flew at air shows. And they flew stolen wildlife from show to show. And don’t you think Mark Trail won’t be quite cross about all this smuggling when he finds out. But The Little Detective, accidentally locked into the cargo hold, started keeping notes. She dropped postcards at airshows. She trusted someone would mail them off.

Finally someone did. It was a letter to her family, who finally had some assurance that was alive and somehow in Sweden. Her family turned the news over to the Jungle Patrol. They turned it over to the Unknown Commander, our favorite stripey-panted walker. Meanwhile she keeps notes on what the smugglers take, and where they take them.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 17th of February, 2019. So the Comics Kingdom web site redesign has been tinkered with. It’s no longer so sluggish or all-around annoyingly bad. But it still isn’t as good as what the site used to be. The Sunday strips, particularly, are turning into messes like this. The four-row, two-column format might not be too bad, if the comic naturally rendered at the full width of my browser, the way it did in the old design. As it is, I can zoom in on the image, and see parts of the art in good detail. But … I mean, my eyes are good, for their age, and they’re not finding this an easy read.

The Phantom catches up with the B-29. I’m not sure where. He must have figured there aren’t that many touring B-29s that have made stops in Bangalla recently. He sneaks into the cargo hold at night, catching The Little Detective by surprise. Diana points out, so, he and his wolf named Devil, in the middle of the night, snuck into the cargo hold where a lone girl has been hiding from the crew for months. He concedes he could have introduced himself less alarmingly. But there was a deadline. The plane was leaving just before dawn; this was his best chance of contacting her before a fight.

The smugglers return to the plane. The Phantom glad-handles them, praising their cleverness and what a great story they’ll have to tell in prison. One of the smugglers spoils the cheery mood by taking out a gun. The Phantom takes back the scene, though. He explains he’s just moving the action over there so nobody accidentally shoots the airplane. It’s a deft touch, showing how simple persuasion is a superpower. The smugglers hardly notice they are letting The Phantom lead them, not until he grabs their gun.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 31st of March, 2019. And here we go. About half of the archived strips are four-row formatted strips. But about half of them are two-row formats like this. The panels are a little bit larger, and so easier to read, but not all that much bigger. And I know there are plenty of newspaper readers who’ve been getting this format forever, but I’m used to the pacing of the strip in its three-row format. I do not like the two- or the four-row formats at all. And this thing Comics Kingdom whipped up for today, the 21st? Where it’ll show some strips as six rows of one panel each, each panel just large enough that you can make out there might be something there? That’s exquisitely bad. That’s not just blowing off the usability tests, like everybody has since 2002, that’s going out of your way to be unusable.

Having blown it, the smugglers try to appeal to The Phantom’s patriotism. At least his historical enthusiasm. How can we possibly have both vintage World War II aircraft operating and some pangolin left surviving somewhere in the wild, after all? The smuggler starts some Greatest Generation talk when The Phantom slugs him, correctly. I mean, first, War Hardware fans are the worst. Second, Bangalla was part of the British Commonwealth of Fictional Nations. They, and their Buranda and Qumran brethren, were having people killed for a year and a half before the Americans put anything on the line. Still, The Phantom’s reaction is only at the level of punching. It’s not like these are Avro Arrow fanboys.

And yeah, I talk a smug game. But I know where my standing is weak. I kinda like the various preposterous ideas to do a lunar landing with Gemini spacecraft. There is an audience to which this is a very funny thing to admit and it is not my fault that you are not in it. Anyway that’s where the action has gotten by now.

Next Week!

So how’s the plane crash going? Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. promised excitement and an emergency touchdown. In a week, barring emergencies, I’ll recap what’s happened since then.

And until then? I keep reading the comic strips for mathematical themes, and share the results on my other blog. I’d be glad if you considered that, too. This week’s mathematics comic strip essay is here.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Where in Africa is Bangalla? November 2018 – January 2019.

If you’re here to catch up on Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity, good. If it’s past April 2019, a more current plot summary should be at this link. The link contains both the Sunday and the separate weekday continuities. But you’ll figure it out. And you may be able to use PhantomWiki, a guide to just what you’d think. I keep going back to check stuff on it myself.

And if you’re here to see where the mathematically-themed comic strips are, the answer is over on my other blog. Glad to have you read a couple of paragraphs about such comic strips as Alley Oop, Ask A Cat, and Six Chix.

The Phantom (Sundays).

4 November 2018 – 27 January 2019.

I teased last week the question of how that whole The Rat dying project was coming along. By the time of my last plot update, he had died, yes. The last bit of business was his funeral. The Phantom stole The Rat’s corpse from Boomsby Prison. He was buried instead in The Phantom’s Vault of Missing Men. The Phantom had felt bad about all those times he told The Rat he was going back to Boomsby after all. Also Skull Cave has a private mausoleum for people who’re Phantom-connected. I bet you Bruce Wayne never considered whether the Batcave needed one of those.

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The 18th began the new, and current, Sunday adventure, The Little Detective Who Disappeared. PhantomWiki lists it as the 187th Sunday story. It starts with a B-29 crew landing in a remote jungle airfield. Jungle Patrol is there, to take the three-man crew into custody. Evacuating just ahead of them: The Phantom — the Unknown Commander of the Jungle Patrol — along with his wolf Devil, and a girl. The Phantom brings the girl back to her home in a Xananga village. (The Xananga are a tribe in the Elephant Valley of Bangalla. If PhantomWiki hasn’t missed something this is their first appearance in the strip since 1991.)

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 23rd of December, 2018. The easy joke to make is that I share The Phantom’s feelings here, about sneaking out of a party long before it’s over. But that’s got no truth in it. It’s hard rousing me to go out and do a thing, yes. But once I’m there? I’ll stick around until the event’s over, and then put in another half-hour, and then when it’s gotten awkward that I haven’t left yet, will wait for some clear sign that it’s been too long. Ideally, this will involve my hosts apologizing but it has been four days now and they had promised to go do some other party, to which I wasn’t invited, correctly.

That done, The Phantom returns to Skull Cave to tell his wife and Guran and also the audience about what just happened. In flashback it tells of The Little Detective, who’d followed strange noises. And disappeared, to her family’s distress. What she found was wildlife poachers, emboldened by Mark Trail’s long sojourn in Mexico. She was examining the crates in the airplane’s hold — including grey parrots being stolen from Bangalla — when the cargo door closed and the plane took off.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 13th of January, 2019. That African grey parrots can be found in Bangalla suggests the place would be near equatorial Africa, on the western side. (But I’m aware the country’s location has been vaguely defined, and sometimes redefined, over the strip’s history.) Anyway, the important thing is: pangolins. Aren’t they great? We should be ashamed what we’re doing to them.

The smugglers’ plan: use the B-29 as a show plane, moving across borders with little scrutiny. Vintage trucks and cargo crates were treated as props, and accepted as such by customs officials. Meanwhile the Little Detective, stowaway, found some projects and kept busy. She’d swipe food from the crew, encouraging them to fight each other. She’d drop notes to bystanders at air shows. She’d … I don’t know from there. That development brings the story to the 27th of January. Shall have to follow up in a few months, when we’ve seen more of what The Little Detective did.

I’ve read comments skeptical that this airplane-show-smuggling scheme could work. It seems to depend on a particular laxity or incompetence on the parts of customs officers. My readings of how security-state organizations work leads to to believe they run at about 49% adequate, 51% fiasco, with occasional flutterings one way or the other that make it into true-crime podcasts. So I wouldn’t expect every customs official to ignore cargo being carried by a show plane. But I can absolutely buy an organization that manages to make themselves look boring enough to avoid close scrutiny by un-corrupted officials, at least for a while. I also understand people who figure that of course customs and immigration works like it’s supposed to. Anyway, it’s a story; we can suppose the bad guys are clever enough to out-think the obvious problems. It’s whether they should also be clever enough to out-think the protagonist that’s where credibility can be strained.

Next Week!

Would-be clumsy mugger Delmer Robertson has reconnected with his old pal and comic strip regular Jordan. But it’s just in time to learn he needs a new kidney. But where will we find anyone who can do something medical? I’ll check back in seven days with the plot recap of Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.

Nothing Is Happening In: Is Something A Thing?

So this past week in Karen Moy and Joe Giella’s Mary Worth, Mary and her darling little imprinted foundling Olivia talked with each other about how wonderful they are with each other and how other people can’t understand them. Um. Well, I guess that’s exactly the impression you get reading the comics. It looked like they did a lot of eating, although I guess that was just the same meal shown over a couple days. Hm.

Well. Ah. In Tony DePaul and Paul Ryan’s The Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks did that thing where a superhero walks around in his civilian guise while the real authorities try to figure out who tied up all the criminals. Then there was yet another weirdly over-specific Jungle Saying (“There are times when The Phantom leaves the jungle and walks the streets of the town like an ordinary man”? That’s nice and catchy, right up there with “On occasion The Phantom searches all over for his car keys and finds he left them in the refrigerator, in the vegetable bin, which is weird because they’re supposed to be either in the tea kettle or embedded in a stick of butter”.) Then he edged as far away from contact with his kids as he could … oh, that’s all what anyone would get from the strip anyway.

Well, Mark Trail didn’t literally punch the radiation poachers this week but … Bah. I give up. You can’t just pick out anything and snark on it. You have to have some attitude and some hope of building it into something better, even if it’s just writing your own story to make sense of it. I can’t turn Fridays into a review of this week’s baffling Compu-Toon panels. There’s not enough meat to them and the guy who draws them seems way too earnest. I’m doomed, I know it.