See You In The Funny Pages!

"Olive and Popeye" for 11-05-2022

King Features recently launched a comic called "Olive and Popeye" with Randy Milholland* and Shadia Amin as the creative team. It's an updated/current day strip that pulls a lot of inspiration from the established LORE and history of the very long running comic. Randy is a huge longtime Popeye/Thimble Theater (and Ducktales) fan and that comes through.

This strip isn't PARTICULARLY noteworthy but I wanted to mention this strip. Along with a few others like "Heart of the City" and "Nancy" it's revitalizing a frequently stale body of established zombie-like work. "Family Circus," "Crock," "Barney Google," "Blondie," etc will keep shuffling along exactly the same as always until the heat death of the universe. New creative teams are exciting... at least when they bring something new to the table. Nothing really changed about, say, "Rex Morgan: M.D.," and "Mary Worth" keeps promising tantalizing, blissful endings and then not delivering. "Olive and Popeye" is a new strip, not an established one, but it's solidly based on a 100 year old property in a very fresh and creative way."

*Randy got his start with a webcomic called "Something Positive" that has been running for about twenty years. It's very definitely more adult-themed as webcomics go, and the early years were pretty "edgy." He's grown quite a bit as an artist and a person since then, matured a lot, and his older stuff can be pretty rough. Check out his website with discretion.