21st century ahoy! S.A. man plots Popeye’s course

When Randy Milholland’s first grade teacher asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he said, “I want to draw Popeye,” the comic hero he loved from the newspaper and TV.

“Maybe you should choose a more obtainable goal,” the teacher responded.

The 46-year-old San Antonio cartoonist had the last laugh (or “ahguh-guh-heh-heh-heh” in

Popeye-speak). He recently was selected to helm the Sunday edition of the 93-year-old comic strip starring the iconic sailor man who’s “strong to the finich ’cause I eats me spinich.”

Milholland appears to be the perfect fit for the job. He’s a “Popeye” savant who can speak in exquisite detail about the strip’s history — the many artists who’ve drawn the salty sailor since it debuted in 1929 as an adventure comic, how Popeye’s on-again, offagain girlfriend Olive Oyl was once a badass who actually killed people and its eventual decline into a simple gag-a-day strip.

For more than two decades, he’s also been a successful webcomic creator, so he knows what it takes to write and illustrate stories and characters that keep readers coming back.

Milholland’s plans, approved by his editors, call for updating the strip to bring it into the 21st century in hopes of enticing new readers to the fold.

“My main goal is to make ‘Popeye’ a comic people can enjoy, something they feel a connection to,” he said. “I also want to get back to the family dynamics of these characters. Many don’t have a traditional family, they have a found family instead.”

It’ll be a big job. Once one of the most successful newspaper strips in the country, appearing in as many as 600 papers daily, “Popeye” has fallen

Billy Calzada/Staff photographer Randy Milholland is taking over the Sunday edition of the 93-year-old comic strip “Popeye.”