The limited edition 2009 Popeye Picnic comic was drawn by George Broderick Jr. and Ken Wheaton and was created as a tourist event promotional item to honor the city of Chester, Illinois and it's most famous citizen, Elzie Seagar, the creator of Thimble Theater... and POPEYE. I brokered the deal with King Features and Hearst and Chester's annual picnic committee & made sure that the trains ran on time in the production zone. I also wrote the entire comic. ALL OF IT! Just sayin'.
During the event we signed somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-2300 copies of this comic. We were joined by the grand old men of Popeye: Hy Eisman and George Wildman who also added their names to the mix. Parades, movies, interviews, food, costumes...FUN! The people of Chester were super. We'll be back!
During a back-room signing of reserved copies held for patrons of the Spinach Can Museum and gift shop, someone made the mistake of asking me to draw the Popeye characters - IN MY STYLE. George and Ken laughed immediately at this request knowing that I love to draw characters as off-model as posible. Try as they might to change the subject, the person persisted. These were the results. The person got scared and was never seen again.
Since they don't really look like the actual characters and are truly horrible underground parodies, I'm considering running a few on some T-Shirts and selling them at shows. The most unofficial and unafilliated homage ever. Who doesn't want a PLOP-EYE or JEP! to show off to their pals?
For those of you who have not yet added a copy of POPEYE PICNIC #1 to their personal comics collection, copies can still be had by sending $5.00 per copy + $5.00 Priority Mail (In USA) to me. I can stuff up to 5 copies (bagged and boarded) into a single mailer for the same amount of postage. For details visit www.yambar.com and click on the NEWS page. Yeah - this is a sneaky way to get you to visit my pro-site but I'm a shameless dude.
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