A new artist has taken over the Popeye cartoon strip, and that means important changes. Says the San Antonio Express News: “Part of Milholland’s plan for ‘Popeye’ is to add some much-needed diversity to the all-white, all-hetero cast.”

“I retconned Olive’s sister-in-law Cylinda Oyl as being Afro-Latina,” he said, referring to the practice of changing a previously established narrative in a work of fiction. “I also want to bring in more characters who aren’t heterosexual. I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either.”

Okay. Fine. This doesn’t mean Popeye will suddenly be nonbinary, muttering, “They yare what they yare” instead of “I yam what I yam,” but who knows?

The cartoonists could launch a new comic that says all the things they need to say, but no. It’s important to rewrite the traditional strips, because (a) it uses the accumulated goodwill of the old version to spread a new important message, and (b) it supplants the previous incarnations with a new version that has more moral authority. And by “moral” we mean “what the proper people believe today, as of 8:53 a.m.,” and by “authority” we mean “Twitter hordes whose bios insist you use ursine pronouns.” Practically the College of Cardinals there.

The revisions have the added effect of identifying bigots and haters — i.e., anyone who complains about revising old Popeye must hate everything new Popeye stands for. Everyone rally behind new Popeye! Down with old Popeye! We must scour the Internet for obscure Twitter accounts complaining about new Popeye (“He probably only eats non-GMO spinach”) and amplify them into BuzzFeed stories about the backlash, because this makes the people who never gave a tin bleep about Popeye feel superior to the mass of seething incels who are one Jordan Peterson YouTube video away from putting on a Klan hood and burning a library because they heard it once hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour.

Here’s the thing: The Popeye comic strip, historically, has never really concerned itself with the details of the characters’ sex lives. Oh, sure, the old salt had a thing for the high-voiced dame with the coat-rack physique, and defended her against the filthy callused hands of Bluto, a briny leering proto-Weinstein. But no one ever spent much mental energy on their relationship beyond that. No one ever wondered whether he’d chug a can of spinach to deal with personal issues. (“Ye can have your ol’ ED pills, I’ve got me a green can stuffed full of thrills!”) Or whether Swee’Pea, the baby that crawled around in a pupal garment, was the product of their union.

Ah, we’re told, that’s because the pale leaden hand of heteronormativity was clamped down tight. There was no room for the imaginative queering of the characters or the relationships. We need a new, enlightened approach, where characters are seen primarily through their sexual preferences, which is of course the most fascinating thing about anyone, second only to whether they spell a red condiment catsup or ketchup.

Okay. So we must now know. What if Popeye . . . liked it rough? What if he had this arrangement with Olive Oyl where he got to choke her but knew when enough was enough? Are we all somehow more free and liberated for even considering that, or is it still permissible to say I Do Not Approve? Even worse, will one be permitted to say I Do Not Care what they do, as long as they don’t frighten the horses? Or include them?

Not many people know this, but Olive had a boyfriend in the pre-Popeye days. E. C. Segar did two strips in the ’20s: “The 5:15,” a tale of a short, harried commuter, and “Thimble Theatre,” the strip from which Popeye would eventually emerge. Olive had a brother, Castor Oyl, and a hapless loser boyfriend, Ham Gravy. I don’t think they married, so the field is wide open for someone to retcon a Gravy–Castor axis, I suppose.

Anyway. It will be interesting to see if any of these revisions will be re-revised in the future, or whether there’s a sexual-preference version of the Brezhnev Doctrine: No character with a nonheterosexual identity can ever be given a different identity.

There would be exceptions. A gay Jewish superhero could be retconned into a Palestinian. Gay Captain America could go trans without much of an uproar. Spider-Man has so many manifestations — sorry, personifestations — now that an asexual nonbinary Spider-Man in the multiverse could shift to a demisexual masculine-appearing Spider-Man without too much pushback from the 17 orange-haired teens who influence the entire culture by making outraged TikToks in their messy bedrooms, but some would note that this is just a diversion: The original Spider-Man, the lodestar, the archetype, remains white and cis, and until he is dethroned, every other manifestation is just lesser by implication.

It’s an odd thing, being keenly interested in the personal preferences of comic-strip characters. We’ve gone from the panic of the Fifties, when the humid imaginations of pecksniffy sociologists found secret gay messages in anodyne comics, to insisting that everyone must know which way Mary Worth swings and proposing that Dagwood and the mailman run into each other on purpose.

It’s all so very daring. And it’s all so very boring. So Garfield is now a lasagnasexual, you say? Fine. It’s still not funny, if that matters anymore.