Vertical Eye Lie Popeye Debuts with Popeye Horizontal
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Eye Lie Popeye by Marcus Williams debuted on Comics Kingdom today (ignore that Friday May 9 date).
While the official story of this Popeye story claims that “the series has already made waves since debuting during Free Comic Book Day [of 2024]” it had partially appeared earlier episodically as a webcomic preview in late 2022. It then appeared as a four issue comic book series during the last half of 2024.
And now it will be run one page at a time on a weekly basis in a vertical webtoon format:
Comics Kingdom’s first-ever “toon” style vertical comic. Eye Lie Popeye reimagines everyone’s favorite spinach-loving sailor in a fun, fresh, and visually dynamic format perfect for mobile and web scrolling.
Below see the first two pages of the comic book to compare to the cutting and pasting and resizing needed to create the vertical version.
It is an origin story of sorts:
Rather than retell old sea tales, Williams and Garcia leaned into the mythology, asking a new question:
“What if Popeye’s famous missing eye wasn’t just a punchline… but a mystery?”
The result is a fresh canon: a younger, scrappier Popeye navigating multiversal threats with a new crew—Olive Oyl, Wimpy, and Judy P’Tooty—guided by the enigmatic Eugene the Jeep. With nods to classic lore and the kinetic pacing of shonen manga, the series has already made waves since debuting during Free Comic Book Day, praised for its emotional depth, cinematic action, and bold character reworkings (including a morally gray Bluto).
This Popeye will be more violent than we are used to but strong to the finish Popeye fan Joseph Nebus reviewed the first ten pages and was impressed:
One may ask: is this adventure canonical? One may answer: does that matter? If the story’s good does it matter whether it gets referenced anywhere else? But it probably is.
… And there’s no limit to the number of continuities of Popeye except the willingness of people to hear the stories.
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