Misanthropic and petty, scheming and nagging, reviled by their neighbors and barely tolerable to themselves, The Bungle Family was the quintessential domestic comic strip of the 1920s. Critical historians like Bill Blackbeard, Rick Marshall and Art Spiegelman have singled out Harry J. Tuthill’s masterpiece as an especially dark and pointed critique of the modern petit bourgeoisie. But George, Jo and Peg Bungle were really the penultimate satirical family of 20s strips. George was no more a man on the make, looking for that get-rich-quick invention or financial scheme, than Barney Google, A. Mutt or even Andy Gump. His wife Jo was no less socially self-conscious and ambitious, nor more of a nag, than Jigg’s Maggie. And Jo wasn’t even in the habit of throwing things. Nor was the Bungle family dysfunction any worse than the in-fighting at Moon Mullin’s boardinghouse.
Continue readingMonthly Archives: May 2022
Damn Commies!: Twin Earths (1952)
Wimpy Gives Popeye a Sissy Lesson
In early 20th Century theater and film, the “sissy” was the dreaded antithesis of two-fisted pulp hyper-masculinity, at best, and at worst was a stereotypical euphemism for what was unspoken in general culture, homosexuality. Wimpy, the dandyish, appetite-driven counterpoint to Popeye’s principled violence, is of course Popeye’s best tutor for all things “sissy.” To make this sexual dynamic even weirder we have Popeye’s Pappy bewildered by his prancing progeny. It reads like an unintended burlesque of Popeye “coming out”. Per a previous post, These dailies precede Popeye deceiving the underground demons to come up and fight.
It is important to note that this gender-bending sequence was followed immediately by another adventure cycle involving Popeye getting the crap beaten out of him in a land of highly muscled women. And this is all happening right after E.C. Segar’s death in October 1938. The strip was being continued unsigned by assistants for the time being.
- Little Orphan Annie: Character Is The Real HeroOn August 5, 1924, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie premiered. Historians often remember the strip for its verbose didacticism or regressive politics. Gray famously crowded his panels with Annie’s homilies to self-reliance and in the… Read more: Little Orphan Annie: Character Is The Real Hero
- Jungle Jim Is A Ramblin’ Man…And Quite the CharmerNo one could mistake master artist Alex Raymond for a proto-feminist. In his and scribe Don Moore’s dual successes of the 1930s, Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, barely-clad distressed damsels abounded. To be sure, Raymond… Read more: Jungle Jim Is A Ramblin’ Man…And Quite the Charmer
- A Tale of Two Comics: Gibson vs. The Comic StripCharles Dana Gibson was the grandmaster of magazine illustration by the time the first wave of Pulitzer and Hearst’s cartoonists disrupted the media universe after 1895. And from the beginning, it was clear that newspaper… Read more: A Tale of Two Comics: Gibson vs. The Comic Strip
- Mad Men Angst: Dedini and ShulmanYou may not think you know Max Shulman and Eldon Dedini, but you probably do. Shulman was a comic novelist of the 1950s whose most famous, enduring creation was The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,… Read more: Mad Men Angst: Dedini and Shulman
- Books That Made Me: A Panels & Prose JourneyPanels and Prose began in September 2019 with a modest post about R.F. Outcault’s mentor in urban urchin cartooning, Michael Angelo Woolf. After a series of shorter posts and book reviews, I started writing in… Read more: Books That Made Me: A Panels & Prose Journey