Popeye’s Tutor (1929)

Popeye’s Tutor Review

Popeye’s Tutor is a storyline in the Popeye the Sailor comic strip series. It’s such a short, but funny story.

Astonished by Popeye’s unorthodox manner of speech and lack of academic knowledge, Castor enlists a private tutor to give Popeye a formal education. This is one of those one-gag stories that ultimately worked because the dialogue was so good and the characterization so on-point. The tutor was very memorable and you could feel his pain by having to teach our favorite redneck.

Popeye is hilarious here. His speech is gloriously made fun of, but the character still remained highly endearing and charming. The dialogue was exceptionally well written per usual for this comic strip and so many lines cracked me up here. The tutor-teacher relationship has rarely been more amusing.

I just wished that this storyline was longer as it felt a bit too short, slim and inconsequential to the overall series. It felt somewhat squeezed in-between the other storylines that have nothing to do with this one. Thus, it felt structurally odd, but this was the time when no clear structure was present in comics, so you have to get acclimated to that when reading it.

Popeye’s Tutor is way too short for its own sake, but it still worked because Popeye’s illiteracy was gloriously mined for laughs through superb dialogue.

My Rating – 4