Popeye

Since it launched, I've made no effort to hide my enthusiasm for Mezco's One:12 Collective. Mezco's been doing a fantastic job bringing characters from all reaches of fandom to collectors in a format we haven't seen done this well in the past. Though it could be argued the One:12 Collective line expanded way too fast from its start, that hasn't stopped collectors from snapping up new releases. Based on what we saw from Mezco at Toy Fair this year, that's unlikely to stop anytime soon heading into 2018.

Ahead of Toy Fair 2017, Mezco held a special event for the media showcasing some of its upcoming products. Due to the weather on the east coast, we were unable to attend, but Mezco didn't want everyone to miss out on the sneak peeks offered at the exclusive event. Shortly after it ended, the toy manufacturer posted a number of teaser photos of some One:12 Collective figures coming in 2017 and beyond. While expected Batman and Wolverine toys were nice to see, it's the likes of Popeye and Doctor Strange that have us itching to get our hands on Mezco's planned products.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. This video counts down the five best newspaper strips that taste great thanks to those two great tastes together.

On December 8th, 1894, Elzie Crisler Segar was born in the tiny town of Chester, Illinois. The youngest of eight children, Segar showed artistic skill from a young age. He spent his teenage years working various jobs (sign painter, house painter, vaudeville musician, movie projectionist), and after enrolling in a correspondence course in cartooning, he began writing and drawing the licensed strip Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers for the Chicago Herald in 1916. He hopped crosstown to William Hearst's Chicago Evening American in 1918, where he created a new strip called Looping The Loop and contributed illustrations to the sports section. In the fall of 1919, he relocated to New York City, began working for King Features Syndicate, and on December 19th, launched the strip that would (eventually) bring him immortality: Thimble Theatre.

IDW has made excellent, if limited, use of Popeye after they acquired the license for E.C. Segar's iconic comic strip character. They published the excellent 12-issue series featuring original material by Roger Langridge and a handful of other artists that managed to capture some of the raucous spirit of the original Segar comedy adventures. They published a very weird Mars Attacks Popeye one-shot crossover by Martin Powell and Terry Beatty. And, since 2012, they've been publishing Popeye Classic Comics, which reprints the comic book work of long-time Popeye cartoonist Bud Sagendorf. While the content may be classic, the marketing has been decidedly modern. The series has often featured variant covers, a popular tactic for claiming rack space in comic book shops. Unlike most comics, however, Popeye Classic — a product of IDW's relationship with Yoe Books — rather exclusively features excellent, often oddball artwork from some unlikely artists.

I love crossovers. Even when they don't really work that well or make a whole lot of sense, it's almost always interesting seeing how characters that don't usually hang out bounce off of each other -- and it's especially fun when you've got a character like Superman. That guy's such a well-known, well-defined cultural institution that there has to be a huge temptation to see how he interacts with pretty much anyone else, even if you don't actually have the rights to do the real thing. But really, that's the magic of comics. Even if you can't get the genuine article, you can always file off the serial numbers and do your own version and get the same effect. Sort of. And that's how Superman ended up spending a good chunk of the '70s hanging out with Captain Strong, a thinly veiled stand-in for Popeye the Sailor Man who was addicted to alien seaweed.

The great thing about Fox News is that it's only Tuesday and you're already about to see the dumbest thing you'll see all week. In this case, it's a clip from Fox's weekend morning show, where three people with the collective brains of a sack of doorknobs turn their reasoned and well-thought out opinions to the world of comic books. Specifically taking on Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman's upcoming run on Thor, where the iconic Marvel hero will get a new identity as a woman, and complaining about Wonder Woman's costume in the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice film by comparing it to Jim Lee's redesign from four years ago that, according to them, appears to be a product of what they characterize as fundamentalist Sharia Law. No, really, this dope on the left actually says that.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.

As the home of an abundant assortment of licensed titles -- many of which popularized at one time or another in animation -- IDW's in a pretty good place to play up its ties to Saturday morning cartoons. This September, the publisher will play up this relationship in titles with direct ties to animation like Black Dynamite, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe A Real American Hero, Popeye Classics, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles New Animated Adventures and Transformers: More than Meets The Eye, but also Danger Girl, Judge Dredd, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and... The X-Files? Hit the jump to see September's full line of "IDW Gets Animated" alternate covers.

Next year, Mars will Attack... everyone. Well, okay; maybe not everyone, but come January, the infamous bubblegum card Martian invaders will take on a wider variety of victims than they're used to, as they go after multiple different franchises throughout IDW's publishing line and face off against robots, zombies, spook hunters and rockstars alike...