Searching for Hy Eisman at newspapers.com Newspapers.com doesn’t carry the Newark News so I can’t get It Happened in New Jersey from there, but here’s a February 20, 1955 story from the New York ...

Thimble Theatre would go on to launch one of the funniest, most popular comic strip characters of all time. Popeye rose to fame rather quickly after the comic strip series was launched.

Curiously, the Polish word ‘Figiel’ means ‘joke’ or ‘prank’, a rather fitting surname for the protoplast of a comic strip hero… But whether Rocky himself knew that he became the inspiration for Popeye ...