Harry J. Tuthill, The Bungle Family (1918)

 

The Bungle Family by Harry Tuthill (1918).

Harry J. Tuthill introduced his domestic strip The Bungle Family as "Home, Sweet Home" in the New York Evening Mail in 1918. The feature starred George and Mabel Bungle as a bickering couple, and quickly established itself as one of the funniest and most sophisticated U.S. comics. Heavy on dialogue, the humour of the strip evolved out of the almost stream-of-consciousness running conversations between the characters and their minor key tribulations, neighbourhood dilemmas, and get-rich-quick schemes. Tuthill had a gift for epic insults and turns-of-phrase, and the panels of his strips are stuffed with one inventive put-down after another and proletarian cracker-barrel aphorisms drawn in a lively style that takes full advantage of the proscenium daily format.

The critics: "The Bungle Family would be a fairly generic, hastily (though charmingly) drawn domestic strip were it not for Harry J. Tuthill's biting text. His often rambling, manic prose drove the feature year after year in word balloons that must have groaned under the weight of all his verbiage. Yet that was precisely the appeal of the strip." --Dan Nadel, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969 (2006).