This came with some huge drawbacks, of course, but the power underlying incorruptible good and gross evil is undeniable. Chester Gould was a country boy at heart, always shocked by what he saw as Chicago's excess, and his work reflected that.Ĭhester Gould injected comics with a black-and-white morality that influenced everyone from Superman to Spider-Man to Rorschach. A reflection of Gould's infamous reactionary streak, violent criminals like Flattop, Mumbles, and Pruneface were the personifications of urban violence, with a little xenophobia thrown in around the margins. While the famously square-jawed hero was simple and incorruptible, his grotesque rogues' gallery was unique to comics at the time. Thimble Theatre's Popeye didn't need spinach to defeat his foes, either, and instead of weaknesses like Kryptonite, Segar relied on character flaws and redoubtable foes like the Sea Hag to challenge the erstwhile ubermensch.Ĭhester Gould's police detective Dick Tracy made it to newspapers in 1931, and he brought a huge host of villains with him.

Introduced in 1929, almost a decade before Superman, he was comics' first popular superhuman, almost as strong and unstoppable as the Golden Age's Man of Steel. He was nearly pathologically generous but he also drank and gambled to excess, and could be a burden to his friends.įor all of his complexity, though, Popeye really changed comics through his muscles.

While Popeye is almost too noble to care about in his animated forms, Segar's Popeye was problematic and lovable in turns. Segar perfected the formula when he added Popeye the Sailor to his already rich cast of oddballs, creating one of comics' most incredible antiheroes in the process. Segar's Thimble Theatre was a blend of humor strips like Bringing Up Father and adventure stories like Terry and the Pirates and Flash Gordon.

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