Supergirl, Prisoner of the Plastic Polynesians

by

Tom diCentauri

She was flying low and slow over a string of islands somewhere in the wide Pacific Ocean. Enjoying the scenery, she had no warning. It was just her bad luck that a wide cloud of kryptonite dust fell to Earth there and then. Abruptly she lost her superpowers and fell.

She hit the water with an impact that would have killed a Terran instantly. But being Kryptonese, she felt little pain. The main effect of the impact was to sap her strength and she might have drowned. Coming gasping to the surface, she swam toward the island nearest her, using a modified version of the Australian crawl to conserve energy. As it was she washed up on the beach coughing out salt water, managed to drag herself far enough up the beach to avoid waves washing over her, and collapsed.

The sun was setting when she woke up. She got up, walked up the beach to where a small stream emerged from the forest, and followed it until she found a pond in which she bathed herself. Having washed the sand and salt off herself and her red-and-blue action costume, she sat against a rock and rested. As darkness fell she noticed that the island and everything on it emitted a faint green light.

As long as she was on the island, she saw, she would remain powerless. She didn't want to take on the sea alone, not in her powerless state, even if she could find a boat. She would simply have to wait. In a few days, perhaps a few weeks, the acid in the soil and the salt in the sea would corrode the kryptonite and she would regain her superpowers. Until then she would have to play Robinson Crusoe on the island.

The next morning she woke up feeling hungry. She went back to the beach and began circumnavigating the island, walking on the wet sand because it gave her more support than the dry sand did. As she walked she tried to remember what she knew about edible tropical plants. So intent was she on her meditation that she only noticed the village when she was already inside it.

Several handsome, dark-skinned men approached her. She noticed, with some amusement, that over their flower-print sarongs they wore calf-length plastic serving aprons. She found out quickly that she could not communicate with them in English, but that she could get by with French. A large, plump man, who seemed to be in charge, stepped forward from the group and introduced himself as Chief Badumpump. He welcomed her to the island and asked where she had left her boat.

She introduced herself and explained how she had come to be on the island. She asked whether they had noticed the pale green glow that had come over the island and, when they acknowledged that they had, she explained that she would have to stay on the island until it went away.

"You are welcome to stay as long as you wish," Badumpump told her. He pointed out the direction to the center of the village. "The women will show you where you may stay and will give you something to eat," he said.

She thanked him and walked in the direction he had pointed out.

"Pale wahine," he muttered as she walked away and he envisioned a fat pale-pink plastic air mattress.

She came into the center of the village and saw that the women all went bare-chested, wearing their pareus as sarongs. Like all of the men she had seen so far, the women all wore wide, calf-length, plastic serving aprons. Also, like the men, they welcomed her to their island. They escorted her to a hut in the center of the village, one they used as guest quarters, and told her that she was welcome to stay as long as she wanted.

They gave her a white pareu that had pink hibiscus patterns printed on it. Deciding to "go native", she took off her Supergirl costume, folded it up, and laid it on the bed. Under the guidance of a young woman, she wrapped the pareu around her waist and tucked it into itself. Then they gave her an ankle-length serving apron made of transparent-white plastic with a transparent-pink ruffle and opaque-pink ties. She was amused to notice that the words "Come 'n' Get It" were printed in opaque pink across the top of the skirt.

She was still fatigued from her ocean ordeal, so she laid herself down in a well-shaded hammock in the village's public area and rested. Relaxing in the hammock, she enjoyed watching the women going about their business and getting mildly hot over the sight of their naked breasts.

Late that afternoon several women came to her and offered to lead her to a waterfall and pool where she could bathe. They gave her a shower cap made of transparent-white plastic that had the image of a red hibiscus blossom printed off center. In the language of flowers the hibiscus refers to delicate beauty and that fact made her feel warm and loved. She started to put it on and stopped when the women giggled. They pointed out that she was putting the hibiscus over her right ear, which meant, in the language of flowers, that she was available for sex. She turned the plastic beret to put the flower over her left ear and then put it on. Then she and the women waded into the pool.

That evening she attended a luau that the tribe put on for her. She blushed when she saw that they had roasted a pig in her honor. She felt like something of a pig herself: her ordeal had made her intensely hungry. She ate everything that her hosts offered her, including a bowl of sweet delicacies that she couldn't seem to get enough of.

When everyone had sated themselves the entertainment began. The women performed a hula and she joined them, performing a Kryptonese sh'lamugg, a dance similar to a combination of the hula and the Twist. Then the dancing ended and the party was over.

Extremely tired, she returned to her hut. She took off her apron and her pareu. Using the pareu as a blanket, she lay down on the bed and went to sleep.

She slipped into a dream, in which she awoke and discovered that the guest hut was actually a jail and that she was the women's prisoner. The women had discovered that they could beat her without actually hurting her: their punches didn't hurt, but merely sapped what little strength the Kryptonese woman still had. So the women would take her out every day and play with her, using her as a punching bag and then masturbating with her when they had softened her up.

They made her wear a transparent-green plastic raincoat when they played with her as a sex toy. It seemed to heat them up to see the soft, smooth plastic swishing and swirling over her naked body. The kryptonitic color of the plastic made her feel weak and helpless, the frisson of anxiety pushing her toward a sexual arousal. Because she didn't perspire in Earth's climate, the raincoat never became uncomfortable.

When the women were through playing with her, two of them took her by her arms and held her up before the woman who seemed to be in charge.

"Now you must prove to us that you will be a good slave," the woman said as she punched her hapless prisoner in the belly. "Show me how submissive you are!"

With the raincoat's hood pulled up over her shower cap, she knelt and kissed the woman's apron. She felt the woman's clitoris come erect and push the apron's plastic against her lips, so she used her lips to rub the plastic against it. And then the dream began to fade....

She awoke before dawn. Getting up, she put on her pareu and apron, then took a look outside. Though she had expected it, she still felt dismayed to see a uniform ghastly green glow everywhere she looked. She sighed: it was going to take several days at least. Still feeling somewhat tired, she went back to bed, though she didn't go back to sleep.

With the villagers still asleep, she had nothing to do, so she masturbated with her apron. She loved the soft, skin-smooth plastic and enjoyed rubbing it up and down over her clitoris. She recalled the dream that had come to her earlier and used it to arouse herself. Sometimes she thought that she enjoyed such dreams as a kind of compensation for her undeniable superiority over the people of Earth, a means of restoring to herself a proper emotional balance.

Later that day she was lounging in a hammock, still tired from her ordeal she believed. As she idly watched the activity going on around her, the young man she had befriended at the luau brought her a bowl of the delicacies that she had liked so much. As he served her he ran his left hand over her belly.

"Why are you doing that?" she asked, trying not to sound unfriendly.

"I'm testing you," he said and then stammered, "to... to make sure you are staying healthy."

Gently she lifted his hand off her belly and said, "I'm perfectly healthy. But I would surely like to have some more of these lovely delicacies."

He left then, but he never came back. Instead, some time later Chief Badumpump brought Supergirl another bowl of the delicacies. She couldn't seem to get enough of them and there were always plenty available to her. If she didn't know any better, she would say that her hosts were trying to fatten her up like a pig.

Several days after arriving on the island she noticed that she was becoming distinctly pudgy, as if she had gained fifty or sixty pounds. She shrugged it off. When she got her superpowers back she would also regain her normal somewhat zaftig figure. It was about this time that Badumpump invited her to join the tribe that evening for a special ceremony in the tribe's large ceremonial house.

As she came into the ceremonial house Badumpump told her that the villagers were celebrating the consummation of their marriage to the bride of the tribe.

"Who's the bride of the tribe?" Supergirl asked. She felt something touch the back of her neck and the world seemed to blur and go hazy for her. Sounds came to her as if from a great distance.

"You are," Badumpump said. He commanded her to go stand on a wide, flat, polished stone in the center of the house.

Unable to refuse, under some strange compulsion, she obeyed and stood herself on the stone. The women took her first. One woman took off her apron and another took away her pareu. They clustered around her, running their hands over her body, patting, prodding, and squeezing her. Each woman took a turn at petting her.

Then a young woman brought her shower cap to her. She held it out so that Supergirl could see, to her horror, that the image of the hibiscus would be positioned over her right ear. Standing helpless, she had to submit to the woman putting the shower cap on her. The woman whispered into her ear and she trembled with sexual excitement as her nipples and clitoris swelled and stiffened. The woman reached into her crotch and touched her clitoris, presumably to test it to see whether it had come fully erect. Smiling, she took her hand away and nodded.

Supergirl felt something touch the left side of her neck. She felt as if something exploded inside her and she heard a loud thump. At the same time her mind cleared, she regained her will, but she was unable to move.

Badumpump came around to stand before her and held out to her an ornately-carved rod. "I used this rod to turn you into an inflated plastic doll, pale wahine," he said. "If you do not wish to be the bride of the tribe, then take the rod and press this end," he added as he pointed to the butt of the rod, "against the valve in your neck. That will change you back to normal."

She tried to reach out and take the rod, but she couldn't move. Something was holding her, pressing her arms and hands against her sides. Long seconds passed as she struggled to move her arms, but she only set herself to rocking to and fro. Finally she saw Badumpump place the rod into a cradle in a box held by one of the women.

"I hereby declare," Badumpump said, "that the pale wahine has chosen to be the bride of the tribe."

One of the women approached her then and punched her in the belly. She fell over backwards, but the invisible something that was gripping her bent with her motion and then straightened up, taking her with it and bouncing her back upright so that the woman could punch her again. She felt as if she had been turned into something like the Batgirl punching bag that stood inflated in Linda Danvers's room in the Alpha Lambda Sorority house for Linda to use in her morning exercises (and presumably Barbara Gordon has a Supergirl punching bag to play with - TdC). The punches didn't hurt, but with each punch Supergirl's inflated skin emitted a rubbery thump and soon the woman was pounding out a rhythm on the tribe's new plastic prisoner. For several minutes the woman beat up the hapless superheroine and then, panting from her effort, stopped and went to sit down

The other women then took turns using Supergirl for a punching bag. Bouncing gaily for them, Supergirl wondered whether they would let her teach them a proper exercise routine. In her plastified state she would be able to punch one of them without hurting her, so she could demonstrate her routine on a volunteer. Then, of course, the volunteer would return the favor and use Supergirl as a punching bag.

Then it was the men's turn to play with her and they did not want to use her as a punching bag, at least not in the pugilistic sense. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing more than an inflated plastic air mattress that they could, and did, use as a masturbating toy. She could feel the heat blossom deep inside her as each man climaxed into her and she felt some concern that she would make a mess when she stood up and the semen that the men had squirted into her leaked back out. But then she became aware of an odd sensation and somehow she knew that it came from her plastic absorbing the semen: there would be no messy leakage.

At last the men finished with her and she was able to put her apron back on. She was not allowed to wear her pareu. One of the men took her to Badumpump and the chief took possession of her.

He had his right arm around her waist and she had her hands crossed over her crotch. He put his left hand out and patted her belly, gloating over how he had fattened her up. Then he pushed her out of the communal house and into the night. She walked with her head bowed in humiliation as he nudged her toward his bungalow. When they reached his destination, he picked her up, carried her up the steps and across the porch, and opened the door.

He pushed her into the bungalow. "Now, at last," he gloated as he closed the door, "you are my plastic prisoner, pale wahine." He closed the door and nudged her toward the bedroom. There he took off her apron and put her into his bed. He took off his pareu and approached the bed.

Then, lying on her back, she saw his erect penis seemingly aimed directly at her. It may have been merely an illusion, but it looked like it was the size of a cucumber. She could only look at it in horror as Badumpump approached the bed.

"You will give us much pleasure, pale wahine," Badumpump said as he lay himself down next to her. "Tonight I will test you as my special pleasure slave, my sex prisoner."

He rolled himself over on top of her, sliding his legs between hers and pushing his penis into her vagina. He wrapped his arms around her and immediately began thrusting his penis in and out of her. She felt the hot, rubbery prong sliding to and fro against the plastic of her vagina, the sensation only intensified by the pressure in her inflated body, increased by his weight pressing her into the bed, squeezing his penis. She felt his skin, soft, warm, and smooth, rubbing her breasts and she began to feel hot inside in spite of herself.

It wasn't making love: it was a simple jump 'n' pump. He jabbed her repeatedly for a little less than a minute, then he caught and held his breath as he rammed his penis into her more frantically. She felt something hot blossom deep inside her in hard spurts, then it ended. Badumpump let out his breath in a sigh, relaxed, and went to sleep on her. Then she felt his penis wilt inside her as the heat it had squirted into her faded out.

She let out a mental sigh. There was no point in feeling frustrated. He regarded her as nothing more than a masturbating toy. So with Badumpump asleep on top of her, she dozed and slipped into a dream:

She had located a barracoon, a place where slaves were kept until they were sold. She noticed that the slaves seemed unnaturally docile and then she found out why: she felt something touch her neck and the world seemed to blur.

"Don't move!" a male voice said. "Now you're my slave," he said, "and you can only do what is necessary to fulfill my commands. Now go get your shower cap and raincoat and bring them to me!"

Unable to stop herself, she left the barracoon and leaped into the sky. A short time later she returned to the barracoon with her Fairy Princess shower cap and her transparent-blue plastic Stormette™ raincoat. She was confronted by a pudgy young man whom she recognized as her captor.

"Now," he said as he brandished the transforming wand, "take off all of your clothes and put on your shower cap!"

She obeyed in spite of herself and then obeyed his command to gain an intense sexual arousal almost to the point of climaxing. Then he touched the wand to the left side of her neck and turned her into an inflated plastic slave-doll. She came out of her daze and looked around as her captor leered at her.

With her mind clear again she noticed again the other slaves in the barracoon. They weren't slaves meant for hard labor. No, once they had been turned into inflated plastic slave-dolls, these were meant to be house slaves, meant to do light chores, such as doing the laundry or pushing a vacuum cleaner. They would also serve their masters as sex slaves. And now she was one of them.

They put her on the auction block. It wasn't a real auction, of course; the outcome was foreordained. No, the faux auction was simply a ritual meant to humiliate her, to weaken her psychologically for the pleasure of her captor. Standing naked, wearing only her raincoat, and with her wrists and ankles bound in soft plastic shackles, she had to stand on the block and endure the jeers and catcalls of men bidding for her body. Finally the auctioneer called out, "Sold!" and her captor took her away as the other men called out obscene suggestions as to how he might use her.

Accompanied by the soft swish of her raincoat and hobbled by the shackles, she shuffled toward the part of the barracoon where the slave handlers lived. Her captor, now her owner, was taking her to his private apartment and she trembled to think of what he was going to do to her once they got there. All too soon they arrived at the man's apartment and entered. The click of the door being locked behind her almost made her swoon from fright. What could she expect, after all, from a man who had made her his personal, private slave-doll?

"Now," he said as he pushed her into his bedroom, "I'm going to play with you in bed. When I cream into you, you'll get pregnant with a copy of your raincoat and you'll be my plastic prisoner forever!"

The thought of being made pregnant with a plastic raincoat startled her awake.

She woke up and couldn't see anything. For someone who can normally see in the dark it was a disconcerting experience. But then she understood what she was not seeing. Slowly and quietly she got out of bed and went to the nearest window. Looking out the window, she noticed that the ground no longer glowed green. The kryptonite dust had eroded away, which meant that she would get her superpowers back if she could somehow reverse her plastification. She got back into bed just in time for Badumpump to roll over on top of her and play with her again.

The next morning she was awakened by the sensations of Badumpump mounting her yet again. She felt her vagina gently stretching as his swollen, rigid penis pushed into it. Again he pumped himself to climax and then lay on her while resting from his exertion. After a time he pulled his penis out of her and got off her.

Lying next to her, he held her with his left arm wrapped around her shoulders and stroked her with his right hand. As he idly played with her, he kissed her cheek and gloated over her. "My helpless blow-up slave-doll," he said. "My hot plastic prisoner. You will be my special toy forever!" Then he got up, leaving her lying on the bed, and went into the bathroom.

She took the opportunity to look around the room to see what she had missed the previous night. She saw what was clearly a big, transparent-black plastic raincoat lying folded up on a small table. Obviously it belonged to Badumpump. She wanted to masturbate with it, but she didn't want to do it with her big, rubber clown watching her. Well, maybe later.

Soon Badumpump came back out of the bathroom and put on his pareu. He picked Supergirl up off the bed and set her standing on the floor. Then he bellied up to her and pushed her onto the holding spot. He gave her a couple of gentle punches in the belly as if to demonstrate that she was as helpless as she looked. Then he picked her apron up off the chair and brought it to her, going behind her to put the apron on her. As he tied the apron on her he said, "We'll be gone fishing all day, but I will want to play with you as soon as I get back, so be ready for me." He patted her fanny and left.

She heard people calling to each other as the fishing expedition came together. Then the voices became fainter and faded away. Then the sound of breaking waves and the wind in the trees were the only sounds she heard.

Left standing on the holding spot, she had plenty of time to think and she remembered something very important: she was Kryptonese. Even without her superpowers she would have been stronger than any ten Earthmen. It stood to reason then that in her plastified form she would be significantly stronger than a plastified Earthman, which meant that things meant to trap plastic prisoners wouldn't necessarily trap her.

She managed to shuffle her feet in a way that turned her until she was facing the chair. Then she began rocking herself to and fro, pumping her hips to make herself move farther with every cycle. Bucking and bowing vigorously, like a child on a swing, she tilted ever farther over with each swing. Then she tried to move her arms. She failed at first, but then she found that if she tried to lift them at a certain instant, she could move them forward. Rocking herself until she was almost hitting the floor, she gave a great heave and managed to grab the chair. Not even pausing to rest, she pulled as hard as she could and slowly, painfully, pulled herself out of the forcefield.

She felt tired, but she didn't dare delay what she had to do next. Quickly she searched the bungalow. Among the things that she found was the deflated body of the young man who had been testing her while she was being fattened. Soon she found the box containing the plastifying wand.

To her delight, she found that the box was not locked or secured in any way. The spring holding the lid shut was stiff, so stiff that a plastified Earthwoman would not have been able to open the box, but her Kryptonese nature came to her rescue again: it was a struggle, but she managed to force the lid open.

She was trembling all over as she lifted the wand off its cradle and held the wand ready to press its butt against the valve stem in her neck. She didn't know that Badumpump had told the truth about what the wand would do, so she felt a certain amount of anxiety. Nonetheless, she pressed the butt of the wand against the plastic tube jutting from her neck. She felt something jolt her from head to toe and she heard a loud whump.

Weight came back to her and a phantasmagoria of sensations assailed her as her supersenses came back to her. The cacophony of sound faded to silence as she reasserted control over her superhearing and the swirling, coruscating lightshow dazzling her eyes became invisible as she regained control over her supervision. Her ability to sense magnetic fields returned to her and she refound magnetic north.

All of a sudden she had to leave and go out into the forest. For an hour she urinated as her superpowers reduced the excess fat in her body. She would squirt out a full load and then have to wait while her bladder filled again. From her vantage, sitting on a rock in the forest, she used her supervision to explore the island and the surrounding ocean. She located the villagers' fishing expedition and saw that she had plenty of time.

While she waited for her superpower nimbus to restore her body to its proper shape, she used the combination of her telescopic vision and her x-ray vision to search the village and its surroundings.

She also took some time to pleasure herself, exciting herself with thoughts of plastifying Badumpump, taking him home with her, and playing with him in her secret hideaway inside Stanhope College's old, now-abandoned steam plant. But then an unconscious feeling of guilt took over her imagination and led her to masturbate to a powerful climax over a role-reversal fantasy:

In the fantasy she saw herself waddling through the village, her swollen belly bulging against the transparent-green plastic of the raincoat she was made to wear. The kryptonitic tint of the raincoat only emphasized her helplessness and humiliation. Pregnant with a copy of Badumpump's transparent-black plastic raincoat, she was being taken to the meeting house to be put on display for the purpose of inspiring masturbation fantasies among the villagers. As Badumpump's attentions had fattened her belly, they had also made her normally A-cup breasts swell up to C-cup size.

After an hour elapsed she had regained her normal figure and no longer was she urinating. The time had come to rectify the situation into which she had fallen. She started by going to Badumpump's bungalow and retrieving the chief's other plastic slave-doll.

She reinflated the young man, reversed his plastification, and interrogated him. She followed the procedure that Badumpump had used on her, touching the butt of the wand to the valve stem protruding from the back of his neck and commanding him to tell her what she wanted to know.

Through her questioning she discovered that the natives had acquired the wand from a witch whom they had then plastified. The witch had been returning to the United States with a shipment of plastic raincoats, aprons, and shower caps from Japan when her boat had been caught in a typhoon and wrecked on the island.

Using metal from the wreckage of the witch's boat, Supergirl made a small cargo pod. She put the deflated witch into it along with her special wand, and some books that she had with her, along with the witch's raincoat and apron. Then, after thanking the young man for the tribe's hospitality (weird though it was), she took the pod in hand and leaped into the sky.

Epilogue:

Using information that she gleaned from the wreckage of the witch's boat, she located the witch's home in the United States. Somewhere in a suburb of rainy Seattle she found the witch's home and snuck into it. Carefully, aided by some spells she got from Zatanna, she removed all of the magic from the house and freed the witch's prisoners.

In the witch's playroom she found three men and four women lying deflated on top of their folded-up raincoats on a padded shelf that ran along one of the room's walls. One by one, she took the prisoners to the living room, reinflated them, and reversed their plastification. Using the transforming wand to impose magical hypnosis on the prisoners, she interrogated them, imposed a little psychiatric healing upon them, and then freed them. Through the interrogations she discovered that the men, in their transparent-black plastic raincoats, had served the witch as punching bags. The women, on the other hand, had been used as bedwarmers and sex toys. Finally she packed up the witch's personal plastic and magical implements, secured the house, and flew back to Stanhope.

One afternoon, when Linda Danvers had no classes to attend, she went to the secret room she had built deep inside the Stanhope College's old abandoned steam plant. There she changed into her Supergirl persona and prepared to play with her new toys.

She opened a lead-covered container to fill the room with just enough kryptonitic radiation to suppress her superpowers and to weaken her to what would be normal human strength. She reconfigured her lounge into a bed, laying a heavy blanket on it. Then she took off all of her clothes and put on her shower cap.

Trembling with anticipation, she picked up the witch and reinflated her. Embracing the witch from behind, she blew into the valve in the left side of the woman's neck. As she blew the witch full she felt the woman's plastic skin warm up and felt the woman begin to squirm in her embrace. With her right hand on the witch's belly and her left hand fondling the witch's right breast, she kissed the right side of the witch's neck. She noticed that the witch was a plump woman and felt her excitement growing as she thought of Badumpump fattening her up.

"Now you're my prisoner," she whispered. She ran her thumb over the rubbery nipple on the witch's breast as she luxuriated in the sensation of the witch rubbing against her own breasts. "I'm going the test you now as my love slave, my big, fat plastic sex prisoner."

Appendix: Pop-Pie a la Mode

This fantasy is patterned after a Popeye cartoon from World War II. That cartoon, in turn, seems to follow the pattern of an older archetype - the story of Hansel and Gretel.

Consider a hidden meaning in the traditional story of Hansel and Gretel. The story seems to encode elements of child molestation. The question that leads to that conclusion is this: Why did the witch test Hansel's fatness by squeezing his finger? Why not poke or pat his belly? The answer seems to be that the finger is a euphemism for the boy's penis and the witch is testing it to see if it's fat enough (erect enough) to put in the "oven" between her legs. That interpretation seems to imply a very old concern with the sexual abuse of children, but I suspect that it expresses something much deeper in addition.

On the day of 1945 Jan 26 the Popeye cartoon "Pop-Pie a la Mode" was released into theaters. When it was rerun on television in the 1950's and 1960's it provided the pattern for many of my favorite sex fantasies. In spite of the racist stereotypes employed, the cartoon provides a nice example of Bondage and Discipline, albeit without the overt sexual content. The story goes as follows:

We see Popeye slathering sun tan oil on his half-naked body. We pull back and see that he is sitting on a crude raft in the middle of a featureless ocean. Suddenly a man, looking like a stereotypical African native, comes by on a raft that he is pedaling like a bicycle. The man is wearing a sign that says, "If shipwrecked try Joe's. Reasonable rates". Following the man with his spyglass, Popeye sees and island and a hotel called "Joe's Always Inn".

Spinning his pipe as a propeller, Popeye drives his raft to the island, up onto the beach, and into the hotel, stopping right at the front desk. The place appears to be deserted and when ringing the bell gets no immediate response Popeye starts to climb over the desk.

We see an eye at the peephole in the door leading to the office. We then look inside the office to see that the eye belongs to the island's big, fat chief. Seeing Popeye crouched on the counter, he envisions the sailor as a chicken drumstick. He then goes out to welcome Popeye to the island. He calls two of the natives, who pick up Popeye on his raft and carry him to his accommodations.

The chief consults a book called "How to Serve Your Fellow Man" written by Ima Cannibal. As he reads he envisions Popeye, fattened to obesity, waddling across the landscape.

We see Popeye lounging in a hammock and we see natives pouring mashed potatoes, french fried potatoes, boiled spuds, baked idahos, more starch, ice cream, and an entire cake into the fattening sailor. As the noticeably fatter sailor daintily washes his hands in a finger bowl held by the chief a small boy slathers mustard on his right leg, puts a bun around the leg, and prepares to take a bite. Abruptly he is pulled away by the chief, who chides him and tosses him aside. Then the chief turns back to Popeye and invites him to a big celebration, while holding a knife and fork behind his back and honing the knife on the fork.

One lovely evening we see the natives pounding drums as they begin a celebration. A bathtub sits at the center of attention and we see Popeye, wearing a flower-print sarong, shyly getting into the tub. As Popeye lounges in the water two natives sneak up to the tub and pull away the sides to reveal that Popeye is actually lounging in a giant cooking pot.

The two natives shove burning logs up against the cooking pot and blow on them to enhance the flames. Popeye notices the increased heat but remains oblivious to his situation. But the little boy slathers mustard onto Popeye's arm, dangling over the side of the pot, puts a bun around it, and takes a bite. The pain brings Popeye out of his reverie and he notices his situation.

We see the grinning natives, holding meat ration books, surrounding the pot. Another native rings the triangle, sending out the "come and get it" signal. As Popeye tries to get out of the pot the natives attack him. He knocks the natives away until they pounce on him en masse. When the dust clears Popeye, wrapped in ropes from neck to ankles, stands on a wooden butcher's block.

Two of the natives, each wearing a butcher's straw hat and apron, use wooden mallets to pound Popeye down into something resembling a steak. They then toss him into a long-handled skillet handled by two other natives, who are wearing chefs' toques. The natives flip him as he cooks, but on one flip his can of spinach comes out and pours the spinach into his mouth. When he gulps down the spinach he explodes out of the skillet with a body-builder's physique. With a Tarzan yell, he lands among the spear-wielding natives.

The natives attack and out of the dust cloud they come flying, bound to their spears from neck to ankles and land in a row, the spears stuck in the ground. Popeye then grabs the spears and, with the natives still attached, throws them into a coconut palm, obliging the chief to climb them like stairs. The chief then falls onto a drum and bounces from drum to drum to where Popeye is waiting to sock him into a cliff. Lassoing the chief with a vine, Popeye spins him like a top, which goes spinning back to the hotel. The chief runs into the hotel and cannons appear in the windows to fire at Popeye. Popeye catches the shells and melds them into a block buster, which he heaves at the hotel. The resulting explosion throws the chief far out to sea, where he encounters two hungry sharks. The chief pulls out his knife and fork and goes after the sharks.

In the final scene we see Popeye, now the king of the island, lounging on a throne as the natives kowtow to him. It ends with the little boy kneeling by his left leg, which he has slathered with mustard and enclosed in a bun.

Note: In the celebration scene Popeye wears a flower-print sarong, much as Dorothy Lamour was noted for doing in films at the time. Having an all-male tribe pounce on him has an interesting sexual undertone similar to that of Hansel and Gretel. We can see that in the cartoon Popeye was the damsel in distress until gulping down a load of spinach gave him the masculine power to rescue himself.

Many of the Popeye cartoons had that aspect of an almost effeminate Popeye being seduced into a trap that obliged him to use his spinach to remasculinize himself. In that respect they differed from the comic strip, which began as Thimble Theater and introduced Popeye in 1927. In the comic strip Popeye was always stronger and tougher than ordinary men (which explains why he was one of the inspirations for Superman), because spinach was a regular part of his diet. On rare occasions he would use a bowl of spinach as a restorative, but he rarely resorted to gulping down a can of spinach to make himself powerful. However, in writing a six-minute theatrical cartoon the writers had to use symbolic shorthand for things that would have taken too long to explain and had to distill the action in order to compress it, so it's not surprising that many of the cartoons had the structure of a Bondage and Discipline masturbation fantasy.

This cartoon also seems to have been inspired by an incident at the beginning of the tale of "Sinbad's Fourth Voyage" in the Arabian Nights. In that story Sinbad and his companions are shipwrecked on an island where they find a village full of "negroes". The villagers capture Sinbad and his companions, but then, in a gesture of apparent friendliness, feed them a salad of herbs, which stupefies the men. The natives then feed the men rice cooked in coconut oil in order to fatten them up, then, as each man becomes fat enough, they slaughter him, then cook him and eat him. Sinbad has, of course, seen through the natives' scheme, so he did not eat the stupefying herbs and ate only enough of the rice to maintain his health, then he escapes from the village.

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The frame of this story was inspired by the story "Mrs. Superman" (in Superman #124, Sep 1958) in which the helicopter carrying Lois Lane and Clark Kent is brought down at sea by a kryptonite meteor. The two castaways land on a tropical island, where Clark discovers that the meteor has landed in a volcano, which now spews kryptonite dust, preventing him from leaving the island.

It obviously didn't occur to the writers to show Superman, who still had his superpowers on the island, launching himself like an artillery shell with enough momentum to punch through the cloud of kryptonite dust and then flying to a nearby ship to arrange a rescue, then flying back to the island by essentially the same method to resume his role as Clark Kent. Or they might have had Clark engage the natives in helping him to build a small sea-going canoe that he and Lois could paddle and sail out to sea to reach another island from which they might call for help.

These observations do not constitute an accusation of stupidity as much as they help illustrate the improvisational nature of the comic strips, which was necessitated by the short intervals of time the writers had to devise a story. In one year Otto Binder, the creator of the Supergirl comic strip, wrote over one hundred comic book stories for various comic strips. With the writers taking only a little over three days on average to write roughly forty pages of script (forty panels in the story), we cannot be surprised that the stories were not as good as they might otherwise have been. Perhaps someday some of the better stories will be rewritten.

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The modern plastic raincoat was invented in 1940 when Bakelite's Krene vinyl film became available. It was manifested in the Exylin brand of rainwear produced by McCoy, Jones & Co., a division of General American Transportation Company based in Chicago. The plastic rainwear was still novel enough to warrant an illustrated article in the June 1954 issue of Modern Plastics magazine.

The shower cap was invented by Isaak B. Kleinert, a prolific inventor and outstanding merchant who founded the I. B. Kleinert's Rubber Company, Inc. in New York in 1869. The first shower caps, made of rubber, resembled bathing caps. In the early 1940's, most likely, came the plastic shower cap of the kind that I describe in these stories. It was a beret-style cap made of a disc of plastic film with a rubber headband. The plastic was calendared smooth (about as smooth as a young woman's skin), as soft as silk, and 4 mil (4/1000 inch or 1/10 millimeter, about as thick as the 20-lb paper in your printer) thick. Transparent and often tinted, the plastic was sewn to a rubber headband of matching color. These were then sold in the notions departments of department stores and mass retail chains (such as Sav-On drug stores in Southern California, in one of which I bought several shower caps through the 1960's).

Accurately dating the invention of the plastic shower cap may actually be impossible. Unfortunately the shower cap is such a minor element of our culture that Kleinerts has no record of its history beyond the fact that Isaak Kleinert invented the first ones some time in the Nineteenth Century. Plastic shower caps were certainly available in the early 1950's (when a first-grade teacher in 1952 said, "Let's put on our thinking caps", I envisioned putting on a beret-style plastic shower cap.) But very likely the plastic shower cap was invented in the early 1940's, when rubber became scarce (needed for the war effort) and polyvinyl-chloride film had become available. Likewise the shortage of rubber may also have led to the invention of the plastic apron.

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