Popeye

Reading the Popeye comic for the first time was the most fun I have had reading a comic all semester.  I used to love watching the cartoon when it came up on television.  The idea of somebody eating spinach and then growing muscles in that very instance was just hysterical to me.  But that is not at all why I enjoyed ready the comic version.

 

The comic version of Popeye is very simplistic, and the way that it is composed allows the audience to have a good chuckle.  With all the comics that I have read in the past few weeks, none of them allowed me to think for my own.  Most of those comics staged you to have a specific feeling or set you up so that you sympathized with the character.  Popeye, on the other hand, does the complete opposite.  Popeye is very simplistic in both images and action.  The character designs are very basic shapes but the characters themselves are very diverse.  The diversity of the characters allow the character to be readable even when the 180 rule is broken in an images or there is no follow through to the next image.  The backgrounds are also very simple, most of them being a few simple lines.  My favorite small body movements the characters make.  The body remains the same while the character’s appendages move ever so slightly.  But even with simple actions the situation that they are placed in makes the whole thing believable. Finally there is no dynamic staging.  Most of the staging for the images is very flat.  In concept I learned that flat staging usually adds a comedic flair to an image.  This leaves the door wide open for a viewer to have a good laugh or two.  With all of this simplicity, viewers are given the opportunity to think for themselves and not be bombarded by the imagery and underlying meaning of an image.  This book was AWESOME!