Forrest Cowles "Bud" Sagendorf (March 22, 1915 – September 22, 1994) was an American cartoonist, best known for his work on King Features Syndicate's Thimble Theatre comic strip. He was a native of Wenatchee, Washington.
Sagendorf began his career while still a teenager circa 1933, as the assistant of cartoonist E.C. Segar on his Thimble Theatre and Sappo comic strips. Following Segar's death in 1938, Sagendorf began illustrating marketing materials for King Features, eventually moving on to illustrate many of the Popeye comic books, starting in 1946. In August 1959, Sagendorf was hired to take over writing and art for the Thimble Theatre comic strip; Sagendorf immediately gave the strip's artwork a breezier, more angular aesthetic and reverted the strip to a serialized ensemble comedy (as opposed to the buddy-comedy adventures his predecessor Ralph Stein had centralized), largely reminiscent of Segar's later output, thus returning Olive Oyl and Wimpy, both reduced to minor entities or mostly unused during Stein's tenure, to full-time main characters. Under Sagendorf, a number of characters increasingly absent following Segar's death in 1938, such as the Sea Hag, King Blozo and Eugene the Jeep, likewise reclaimed recurring status.
Sagendorf continued to work on the strip full-time until February 1986. Wanting to spend more time with his family, he reduced his output to the Sunday strip while Bobby London continued to produce new daily strips, until their discontinuation in July 1992 in favor of reruns of Sagendorf's work. Sagendorf nonetheless wrote and drew the Popeye Sunday strips until his death in 1994 in Greater Sun Center, Florida, rendering him the longest-tenured artist to have worked on the strip. King Features continues to run reprints of Sagendorf's daily strips, while artist Hy Eisman succeeded him on the Sunday strip, which continues to be published first-run into the present day under Eisman's replacement Randy Milholland.
In 1979, Sagendorf's book Popeye: The First Fifty Years was published.
In addition to his work on Popeye, Sagendorf created a daily comic strip, Spur Line, which was syndicated by Associated Press Features. Spur Line ran from February 15, 1954 to April 2, 1955.
Characters created by Sagendorf include: Granny, Dufus, Patcheye, Hardtack, Birdseed, Meldew, Otis O. Otis, Georgie the Giant, the Misermites, Percy Pink Skin, Axle and Cam and Sherm.
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Sources[]
- Grandinetti, Fred. Popeye: An Illustrated Cultural History. New York: McFarland & Company. Pgs. 15-16.
- Holtz, Allan. "Obscurity of the Day: Spur Line Retrieved April 5, 2018.
- Markstein, Don. "Popeye the Sailor". Retrieved August 26, 2007.