Tentacle Tuesday: Tentacles in Hiding

Greetings to all my dear tentacle zealots! This week I am rather exhausted from a move (not mine own, which somehow makes it worse?), and so I will retreat into my cozy shell, just like this handsome fellow:

But I don’t want this to be a complete disappointment, so I will leave you with these two panoramas:

Supper at Sea by Ben Boling, a freelance illustrator who posted this beauty on his deviant art profile.
Characters from left to right: Alice the Goon (topless!), the Sea Hag, Poopdeck Pappy, Brutus, Professor O.G. Wattasnozzle, Olive Oyl, Popeye, the Jeep, J. Wellington Wimpy, Rough House the cook, Swee’ Pea, George Geezil, Castor Oyl.

To quote the man in question: «  This, my dearies, is my takeoff on Leonardo’s Last Supper. All of the characters are from the Thimble Theater strip by E.C. Segar, which later became just the Popeye comic strip. I tried to keep most of the characters in the same positions as the apostles are in Leonardo’s version, and tried to put in a few little fun things relating to the original. For instance, putting Olive in the same place as the apostle John, who some believe to be Mary Magdelene. I also had to put Brutus in the place of Judas Iscariot, and have him holding money (pieces of silver). Some theories also say that both Judas and Christ were reaching for the Eucharist in Leo’s version, so I included that too, replacing the bread with limes so they don’t get scurvy. And the cigar in the ashtray is a tribute to Popeye’s creator E.C. Segar who used to sign his drawings with a little cigar with the smoke forming the letter “S” in his name. The halo effect in the wood around Popeye was pretty much an accident, perhaps there was divine intervention? »

Of course you can also revisit the past in the shape of Tentacle Tuesday: Popeye, the Sailor Man.

And, in a slightly different vein —

« In 1952, Charles Addams, at the height of his skills as a cartoonist, painted a lush, monochromatic mural on canvas for a bar at the Dune Deck, a hotel in the Hamptons. (The work is nearly fourteen feet long and more than four feet high.) When the hotel changed hands, the new owners—one of them a Penn State alumnus—donated the painting to the university’s Palmer Museum of Art. A few years later, it was transferred to the library, where it hung in the Lending Services area, until it was relegated to its current location, in 2000. Somewhere along the way, it picked up the name ‘An Addams Family Holiday.’ »

As seen from the quote, this ‘mysterious’ mural by (naturally) Charles Addams has a quite interesting, recent-ish discovery story. Read about it the excellent article in the New Yorker (excerpted above) here, or if you don’t have access, try the slightly less well-written, but nevertheless informative version here (sorry, Pennsylvania News).

The proud artiste:

~ ds

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