Monday PSA: Popeye and Public Service Careers
Filed under: Comics
Mike mentioned the Popeye and Environmental Careers comic a few days ago, but it’s not the only career PSA comic featuring the spinach loving sailor. In fact, King Features published fifteen different “Career Educational Comics” in the early ’70s. Sadly, the only one I own is Popeye and Public Service Careers, so that’s going to be this week’s public service comic.
Popeye and Public Service Careers features Popeye and Olive Oyl (both strangely eloquent, if not downright loquacious) telling readers about different careers available for them. The comic is clearly written for the high school student planning for their future. The educational requirements, from high school diploma to an advanced degree, are spelled out explicitly for each career, as are the benefits including vacation, pay, insurance, and retirement. As you would expect from a comic from 1972, there is more than a little implicit sexism in the comic (for example, no female firefighters or college professors, and no male nurses or elementary school teachers).
It’s a hefty comic, 32 pages, that goes into detail on an impressive variety of “public service careers.” It’s a long list of occupations (and I’d argue that calling a few of them “public service” is really stretching the term): police officers, firemen, sanitation workers, civil service workers, public health nurses, sanitarians (environmental engineers, food inspectors, etc), public utility workers, elementary school teachers, secondary school teacher, college professors, librarians, postal workers, lawyers (no, really — lawyers are “public service”), clergymen, city managers, and members of the military.
June 1st, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Aside from the sexism, what struck me is the hinting as to what exactly Runaway Ellen is doing on that street corner in the bad part of town.
The most sexist one for me is the nursing one. It sort of hints that nurses aren’t medical professional workers.
Makes me think of my uncle who became a nurse in the 70’s after being a Navy corpsman in VietNam. I can hardly imagine how hard that must have been for him.
June 4th, 2009 at 4:26 am
To be fair, quite a few lawyers actually are public service workers.
Public defenders, legal aid at battered women’s shelters, and the like. Certainly, this is a minority of lawyers, probably because working at a private law firm pays dramatically better. But saying that all (rather than most) lawyers don’t count as doing public work is a bit of an oversimplification.
December 19th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Sexist sure, but it tries for ethnic diversity: even aliens with pea soup colored skin can become policewomen.
October 7th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
I happen to come across 13 of the 15 Popeye Career comics while I was cleaning out boxes from storage. They came out three years after I graduated. While these day they would be labeled “sexist” they really were pretty right on for the time period. I found them to be interesting and certainly with their own slant on thing back in the day.
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