The Brass-Mine Swindle (1929)

The Brass-Mine Swindle Review

The Brass-Mine Swindle is a storyline in the Popeye the Sailor comic strip series. It’s such a well written, amusing story.

Castor, Olive and Ham regain their fortunes from Dice Island. Castor proceeds to spend the entirety of his finances on purchasing a “brass mine” despite warnings from others that no such thing exists. This storyline continued the trend of these first stories relying heavily on money and scheming to get money. But here Castor was at his stupidest as he did not realize that a brass mine doesn’t exist. The bulk of this comic focuses on the characters’ stupidity to recognize that they made a terrible mistake and all of those moments were hilarious.

Castor and Popeye’s relationship continues to delight me in these stories. It’s always the same dynamic of Castor being the smarter, but neurotic one and Popeye being dumber and more prone to fight. Here, things changed a bit as Castor was also not smart in his terrible decision and I loved the comradery between the two. The dialogue was exceptional and the characterization superb, though obviously the story was smaller in scale for better and for worse.

The Brass-Mine Swindle is an exceptionally well written comic storyline that benefits from superb dialogue, a particularly memorable Castor and great humor that was well mined from his hilariously dumb decision where to invest money.

My Rating – 4.6