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[caption id="attachment_5887" align="alignleft" width="150"] 1995 U.S. postal stamp.[/caption]

Google -- celebrating it's 15th birthday today -- was not named after a comic strip character. The official history is that when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided, in 1997, to ditch the original name -- "BackRub" -- they chose "Google" as a play on “googol,” a number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. They did not name it after the famous cartoon character Barney Google. One blog wonders about this.

The above classic Jeep, seen in Kitsilano, on the other hand, probably was named after a comic strip character: Eugene the Jeep, a go-anywhere, do-anything, little critter, who debuted March 16, 1936, in Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre newspaper comic strip, now called Popeye, after it's star. The Willys MB U.S. Army utility vehicle was introduced five years later in 1941. The theory is that soldiers were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after the character in the Popeye strip which was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems." This isn't the only origin story for the name, but it's the one I heard growing up as a rabid comic fan!  Click the images to enlarge them.

Selection of great pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre comic strips ►
search on the phrase “Google in 1998” ►