Olive and Popeye began on August 30, 2022 with the team of Shadia Amin creating the adventures of Olive on Tuesdays and Randy Milholland doing the same for Popeye on Thursdays.
But after a year Shadia gave up the assignment back on August 22, 2023 saying:
Hi all! Today my last strip of Olive & Popeye is up! I’m working on new projects (yay!) but that means I can’t give O&P the time and care it deserves!
I’m so grateful for the team at @ComicsKingdom for the opportunity and @choochoobear for being an awesome work mate! I’m so grateful to have worked on a childhood comic of mine and I’m excited for the new artist taking my place! Adventure awaits!
The new Olive cartoonist turned out to be her Olive & Popeye compatriot. Randy Milholland, exploring his inner feminist, took on the Olive portion on the Tuesday of August 29, 2023 while continuing Thursday’s Popeye portion of Olive & Popeye (and continuing to do the Sunday Popeye page and his Something Positive strip).
As Randy informed us it was a temporary assignment:
Today’s Olive and Popeye (I’m doing Tuesday strips until KF finds a new artist for them)
It took a month but new Olive cartoonist Emi Ane Burdge made her debut on October 3, 2023.
Emi Ane kept the news under her hat until the day before her first Olive:
My name is on the site, so I figure I can say something now. I’m now one of the official artists for the Olive & Popeye comic! My first strip goes up tomorrow. I’m so excited to have this opportunity, and I hope you all love what’s coming up!
We welcome Emi Ane as the latest in a long line of fine Popeye cartoonists – among them:
Segar, Zaboly, Sagendorf, Wildman, London, Eisman, Milholland, Amin, and now Burdge.
Olive & Popeye © King Features Syndicate
I still can’t come up with any enthusiasm for exhuming old characters and retreading them into zombie features. I’d be much happier if they just started reprinting the original Segar strips, without trashing them with unnecessary reformatting and atrocious color, such as what has happened to the “Mutt & Jeff” archive. If Emi and Randy are that good, can’t they invent a strip of their own?
Still not nearly as bad as what happened with the new team on “Alley Oop”. Nearly five years into the “Reign of Error”, Oop hasn’t been in a single fight of any kind, a solo time-travel adventure, or Lem-Moo war. Long-time characters like Foozy, Oscar Boom, and the Wizer have simply disappeared. Moo has been transformed into a watered-down version of Bedrock, replete with talking dinosaurs. Dramatic conflict has been sacrificed for the daily “joke” which is usually some off-the wall non-sequitur. The current story line actually glorifies the use of hallucinogens as each of the three main charcters (Oop, Ooola, Wonmug) have embarked on mind-altering trips after ingesting “moss”. Topped off with dull, uninteresting art usually set in an off-putting industrial gray or green, the strip is a real mess.
You might have missed that Comics Kingdom does run the original, 1930s, Thimble Theater strips, among their Vintage comics. They’re not colorized, and don’t include the Sunday strips, but they restarted the original Dice Island storyline just a couple months ago. https://comicskingdom.com/thimble-theater should give you the current day’s strip even if you aren’t a subscriber.
They are running the Dice Island story but skipped the beginning of it where Castor receives the Whiffle Hen.