Something to do with Popeye, probably. Maybe.
Anyway, here’s tonight’s replacement CIDU (or this morning’s, for our European friends, and this afternoon’s for our Asian friends)
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Yea, it’s about Popeye. I think it’s that he’s eaten him, and apparently after digesting him and his recently eaten spinach, he absorbed Popeye’s powers and transformed into a strongman too. (Check out his arms.)
I think the only problem with this idea is that Popeye’s arms are always like that, spinach or not. It’s his biceps that change, if anything. If the monster now has spinach power, other sections of his arms would have been affected.
Of course, since when was Popeye an herbivore? I mean seriously, why would an herbivore open a friend chicken chain?
Monday’s Moderately Confused Is worth comparing here:
P.S. @ Bill – Perhaps his pals are not sufficiently courageous?
The obvious ;) answer is that Popeye is no more the first hero with bulging forearms to don the sailor hat and fight for love than he is a vegetarian. After all, the dinosaurs walked the earth long before Bluno and Olive Oil ever did. And could even a t-rex match the Popeye we know and love at full spinach power? No dinosaur ate Popeye, but Popeye ate a dinosaur so to speak.
No, this is a Green Lantern-style origin story, and it has everything to do with the chicken chain you mentioned. Since at least the day this t-rex ate that herbivore, the spirit of Popeye has always existed, passing itself from one special individual to the next by continuity of bodied (ie either eating or procreation). This t-rex gained the powers of Popeye by eating a herbivore, and it passed on the powers and mission through its avian descendents for millions of years until one of those descendents (presumably childless) ran afowl of a fried chicken enthusiast who ate it, thereby gaining its powers as the t-rex had before and thenceforth becoming Popeye. Presumably Robin Williams killed and ate that guy sometime before 1980 and used his powers to advance his career, and I guess probably the world’s current Popeye is one of his kids but they keep their powers secret.
Popeye’s Chicken chain was not named after Popeye the sailor, though they used his image for advertising purposes for a while.
And the Moderately Confused was much the better joke.
The really weird part, Arthur, is that it’s called Popeyes without the apostrophe.
Drives me crazy every time I see the sign. I want to grab a ladder and draw in the apostrophe.
@CIDU Bill: don’t read anything published in England. They don’t use the possessive apostrophe, or the period after abbreviations.
Where the heck are these dinosaurs, anyway? The wife(?) and nurse are looking at P. rex through a window as he sits … in a waiting room? I’ve never seen that setup at a doctor’s office.
I do like “Early Life” magazine.
@carlfink – no, it looks like the wife is outside the window in the waiting room. You can see her purse and the bottom part of her dress outside the window.
Here’s another from last month, which I really didn’t ‘get’, . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/lio/2019/05/26
I am missing the bit about “replacement CIDU”. Was something removed?
Not removed: rerun.
Andréa: Lio, using his chemical prowess, grows a particularly strong strain of spinach; he then sells this spinach drug-dealer style to Popeye, well known spinach fiend. Think of the spinach as if it were marijuana.
@Bill: the way I deal with poor orthography is to re-imagine whatever is being referred to as being literally as the orthography suggests. In this case, Popeyes must be a place that sells lots of popped eyes.
“Andréa: Lio, using his chemical prowess, grows a particularly strong strain of spinach; he then sells this spinach drug-dealer style to Popeye, well known spinach fiend. Think of the spinach as if it were marijuana.”
THAT I understood; just didn’t know why it was funny. But then, Lio isn’t always supposed to be funny, per se.
When I read the first two responses, I was struck (again!) by the idea that a newbie coming in here would think we’re all nuts.
And they wouldn’t necessarily be incorrect.
Whilst reading the first two responses again, I saw that Bill’s actually reads “I mean seriously, why would an herbivore open a friend chicken chain?” and wondered what a Friend[ly] Chicken Chain would be like.
Now I’m getting silly . . . time to get offline and read a book for a few hours.
Given all the scrawny arm references to T-rex, I’m surprised he’d want to see a doctor about that.
Adréa: I can only ‘splain ’em, I can’t make you laugh at ’em…. Juxtapositioning and cameos of other cartoon characters in inappropriate scenarios are, as defined in the 1982 Syndicated Editor / Deadline-Facing-Blocked-Cartoonist Accords, funny.
@lark: “In this case, Popeyes must be a place that sells lots of popped eyes.”
Could just be a sign expressing support for the Vatican. (Across the street is a sign put up by dissidents: Popeno.)
@Arthur: “Popeye’s Chicken chain was not named after Popeye the sailor”
So, my second guess would have been after the murderous degenerate in Faulkner’s SANCTUARY. (Does the restaurant offer corn on the cob as a side dish? If so, I wouldn’t recommend it.)
“Yea, it’s about Popeye.”
More accurately, it’s referring to Popeye. This is at least 65 million years before Popeye ever rowed into Sweethaven.
“Where the heck are these dinosaurs, anyway?”
They’re at the doctorsaurus rex’s office. The patient and his wife have walked in, and are talking to the nurse at the registration window. It’s true that nowadays, we tend to put registration at a desk out with the sick people, but in the olden days, we kept all the sick people together outside of the doctor’s actual presence. And, again, this scene is at least sixty-five million years ago.
I think we’ve had previous conversations about apostrophes. Removing the apostrophe seems to be common for many companies, perhaps because it simplifies the logo and typography. https://www.mainstreethost.com/blog/why-are-so-many-brands-forgetting-their-apostrophes/
At least Popeyes doesn’t seem to have any stores in Quebec. If they did, I’d say that they’re going the Tim Hortons route and leaving it out so they don’t have to have separate “French” signs.
Shrug: I love it! All the more so because I have a really hard time reading it like that, I really have to put effort into it. It would be really great if we could start a snopes-worthy hoax that this is really a papist establishment, and have idiots in the bible belt boycotting Popeyes…
Apparently Popeyes never had an apostrophe. Wikipedia has a quip from the found that he couldn’t afford one. The article also reports that it was named after the Popeye Doyle character from The French Connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye%27s_Famous_Fried_Chicken_%26_Biscuits
I assumed they were in the ER.
@Phillip, now that you point it out I can see it. P. rex breaks up his wife’s form, along with her purse, to the point that I didn’t parse that odd color blob under the counter as her body. Also the wife’s head is so close and parallel to the nurse’s that I mentally put her the same distance from the viewpoint.
Well, shows where my mind is these days…. I assumed they were in a dementia ward and the old geezer dino was suffering memory loss.
That’s *not* whats going on, but that is where my mind is.
Way back in the 1950’s Mad Magazine pointed out that Popeye was almost indistinguishable from Mammy Yokum.
Ah, yes. We’ve already discussed the apostrophe in Popeyes: https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/strange-but-true/
(Followed quickly by a separate discussion of the grocer’s apostrophe: https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2018/06/12/yes-it-matters-ot)
Popeyes chicken in the Times Square area in the 1970s and 80s had a white Popeye. At night though when the sign was lit up, the figure, specifically, was not lit up and was brown in color.
And we have a small chain of seafood restaurants out here called Popei’s
Of course, if a dinosaur did try to eat Popeye while he was eating spinach, it would end up “exstink”: