The Gun Counter

Mud_Dog wrote:Popeye was more popular than Mickey Mouse? I was not aware of that.

From what I've seen they had some fairly good cartoons, but he's got some kick-ass chicken.

A blonde chick in a robe lounged in the curtained entrance to a dressing room at the side of the stand, talking to a dapper little old man with a snow-white Van dyke and a string tie. Mrs. Ford told me he was Wellington J. Reynolds, who taught anatomy and painting. She added that two of his students in the academy had won the Prix de Rome. As we approached him she warned me in a whisper to never, never let him know I wanted to be a cartoonist, because he hated the breed.
"Mr Reynolds, here is a boy with some talent, but absolutely no training," Mrs. Ford said. "Please look after him. His ignorance is complicated by cockiness."
The Model grinned and the old painter looked me over.
"Do you think you know anything about the human figure?" He asked.
"A little, sir," I said, cautiously. "I've studied a few books." This was a lie. I had once looked through a Gray's Anatomy in a doctor's office.
"How many heads high is this girl?" he asked.
"Well, I never thought of it that way," I said.
"All right, how far down the length of the average head is the center of the ear?"
"About a third," I said.
"My God," he said to Mrs. Ford, "what's he doing here--understudying to draw Popeye?"
I learned later that one of Reynold's former students had been a gifted fellow named Segar. The teacher had high hopes for the young man, possibly seeing him as another Prix de Rome candidate, but Segar couldn't care less about that stuff. He wanted to do a comic strip. Reynolds, disappointed, began needling him in class. Segar bided his time. Later he created Popeye, the one-eyed, spinach-eating sailor. Popeye became a huge success, both as a syndicated strip and as a series of animated movie shorts. The cartoonist went out of his way to mess up his hero's anatomy. Popeye's upper arm was pencil thin, whereas the lower part was huge, as if that was where the biceps lived. It's hard to imagine the effect this had on Reynolds, who was known to make a student repeat a drawing of a kneecap a dozen times or so until he had it right. Worse, Popeye's best friend was named J. Wellington Wimpy, a sloppy, lazy, paunchy, greedy bum who was the very antithesis of Wellington J. Reynolds, the natty, dilligent, wiry, ascetic scholar, artist, and teacher.