Richard McGuire is an artist with a thousand facets. Leader of a New York post-punk band in the early 1980s, Liquid Liquid, at the same time he covered lower Manhattan with stencilled posters.He then embarked on a career as an illustrator, notably working for The New Yorker, before signing a number of children’s books that were to leave their mark on the children’s publishing scene in the 1990s. At the same time, he made animated films, designed toys and produced projects that were free of any framework, such as the Popeye and Olive series.In the mid-2010s, he published an experimental graphic novel that has become an essential part of the history of comics: Here.

Popeye and Olive was born out of an exercise in meditation through painting that Richard McGuire undertook a few years ago.By tirelessly repeating shapes on paper, with no intention other than the gesture itself, the silhouette of Popeye emerged one day. From there, McGuire decided to use E. C. Segar’s character ad infinitum, while bringing him back to his essence (muscle, a pipe and a cap), and then to do the same with Olive Oyl. Little by little, combinations took place, the shapes complemented each other and told the story of the couple’s interactions: rejection, attraction, competitiveness, tenderness… A relationship was born over the course of the drawings, and it is now an abstract love story.

First published in 2001 by Éditions Cornélius in a screen-printed edition of 200 copies, Richard McGuire’s Popeye and Olive is now being reissued by Fotokino in a direct-tone offset version. -Publisher