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The writer and editors of the left-leaning newspaper were almost giddy at the news that the Popeye comic strip, after nearly a hundred years, was getting "a fresh look." As Randy Milholland, the new artist/writer in charge sees it, Popeye is now a "tail-end Gen-X'er and Olive Oyl is a millennial." Hmmm.
The article goes into detail on the character's history and personality as originally created by E.C. Segar and carried on through the years by various cartoonists after Segar's death. The piece stresses that going forward the strip will focus on Popeye's good heart and desire to help others who are less fortunate than he is.
Well, okay. Popeye always did have that quality but that wasn't the thrust of the strip. Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, claims that Popeye was "always looking out for those in need of help." No, actually that wasn't his purpose in life. Popeye had a code of ethics and believed in right and wrong, but Farago makes it sound like Popeye was a community organizer.
Since the Washington Post purposely hid the details, the article never gets specific as to what changes to expect in the comic strip. But after I dug a little further on the internet, it became clear that the Popeye comic strip is going "woke." Cartoonist Milholland will be adding more ethnic diversity and "more characters who aren't heterosexual."
"I [want] to bring in more characters who aren't heterosexual," Milholland said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News. "I don't live in that purely straight white world, and I don't think a lot of other people do either." Wait a minute. I didn't realize that heterosexuality was a purely white cultural thing. Live and learn.
He described the Popeye character as being "gender fluid," citing old episodes in which the plot required Popeye to dress in drag. Milholland took issue with the way the Popeye strip used men dressing as woman for comic relief. "But that wasn't always the case," he told the newspaper. "If you go by today's definition, Popeye was gender fluid."
During the strip's early days, he said, Popeye once met an orphaned girl who didn't have a mother. "So Popeye dresses up as a woman and says, " 'I'm your mom now,'" Milholland said. "And it's not a joke; it's Popeye being the kind character he originally was. Someone who'd do whatever he could for someone down on their luck, like an orphan." And that is supposed to mean that Popeye is "gender fluid?" Yup. Here we go again folks.
The comic book superheroes did it, Archie Comics did it, and now even Popeye is going trans. That's some makeover.
And in another example of diversity, Olive Oyl's sister-in-law Cylinda Oyl is now Afro-Latina. Cylinda had traditionally been portrayed as a white woman with dark, bobbed hair. And why wouldn't she be? The characters in the Popeye comic were all white. That was in the days when being white characters wasn't considered wrong, as is now with the leftist woke mob.
You want to have transgender comic strip characters? You want to have "diversity" comic strip characters? Fine. I don't care how many genders and colors and ethnicities of cartoon characters you create, just put them in a brand new comic strip. Stop messing with what someone else has already created and was immensely popular for almost 100 years. Stop changing the classics.
But that's just the thing, isn't it? They won't create their own. They have to take what's already been done and twist it and bend it to suit the leftist ideology. The whole idea is to tear down what was and replace it. That's why they tear down statues of our American heroes. That's why they stopped teaching true American history in schools and want to replace it with critical race theory and the 1619 Project. They "makeover" what they can and what they can't makeover they cancel.
As a life long Popeye fan I'm sorry they didn't just cancel the strip entirely. It would have been a more dignified ending to one of America's greatest comic strips.
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