Olive’s False Lover (1929)

Olive’s False Lover Review

Olive’s False Lover is a storyline in the Popeye the Sailor comic strip series. It’s such a funny and entertaining story.

Now fabulously wealthy from the trio’s excursion to Dice Island, Olive is sought and courted by the shady equivocator Julius Herringbone, inciting Ham’s envy and leading Castor to enlist Popeye to apprehend Herringbone. This is another Popeye comic that is very confined in its setting, but in this instance it worked gloriously and is even better than the hen section in the last entry. While even more could have been mined from this fantastic scenario, the comic was mostly hilarious.

This is an Olive-centric storyline and I loved that. Olive here gets to have somewhat of a feminist arc, especially in some of her arguments with her father, but she obviously ends up being stupid and naïve. The villain was excellent and manipulative, though obviously he could get away with it for a very long time due to the stupidity of our main heroes first and foremost.

Popeye is very amusing and his obsession with punching people is put to good use here. Castor is also memorable and I really liked his interactions with his sister. The illustrations are pretty good, but to be honest not particularly ambitious. But the humorous dialogue is phenomenal in this comic, very sophisticated and something you don’t see much these days how clever and genuinely funny it is. This is why these early Popeye stories flow so well.

Olive’s False Lover is limited in scope, but superb in humor, characterization and dialogue. It’s such a well written story that made great use of Olive herself.

My Rating – 4.5