The old E.C. Segar Popeye strips offer great pulp scenarios. Boxing, treasure hunts, all sorts of good stuff. Before the animated cartoons, Popeye didn't need spinach to be strong, he was just super hardcore all the time. In his first adventure he gets shot sixteen times over the course of a brawl, and keeps on coming. They're great strips, and have been reprinted by Fantagraphics in big oversized hardcover editions.
The reason Olive Oyle is generally so thin is that she was a parody of flapper style when she was first created, and super thin was super in in the 1920s. The short hair, short dresses, and generally shapeless figure was all the rage at the time. Her clothes got more modest as time went by, but originally she was an exaggerated hipster.
These figures look lovely, by the way.
Also, with the exception of the Spinach element, which was created later for the Max Fleisher cartoons, Popeye is now public domain (Segar died only ten years after creating him in 1929). So if you want to actually NAME these figures Popeye, Bluto, and Olive, rather than dancing around it as the law so often requires, you can totally do so, and maybe drive more attention to 'em.