by George Tuthill
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
My candidate for Most Underrated Comic Strip in our History: George Tuthill's The Bungle Family, a domestic comedy strip that ran off and on from 1924 to 1945. It was fairly popular in its day but rarely gets a mention in books on the medium and has certainly never been honoured with a U.S. government postage stamp design like Blondie. Tuthill's grubby, uningratiating drawing style and the verbose density of balloon prose hardly make a good first impression; Tuthill's genius was as a writer able to put over one of the darkest visions of American life this side of Nathaniel West. The lower middle-class Bungles, George and Josephine, have no more charm than the style they're drawn in: they are petty, mean-spirited, with no self-awareness, constantly bickering and backbiting among themselves as well as with their neighbours and landlords. Unlike Dagwood and Blondie, one doesn't feel that this is a couple that genuinely cares for each other; they are accidental allies surrounded by hostile figures they detest more than each other. There is no one panel or sequence that can encapsulate this strip's sardonic qualities: Hell is in the details that accumulate in the repeated daily doses that the newspaper comics theatre can provide. Tuthill's misanthropic vision (he's the funny page's Celine) is painfully real, though the strip careened through surreal episodes - especially in its later years - that included visitors from outer space and time travel. visually deadpan, genuinely hilarious once you tune in to its frequency, with a great ear for dialogue and an unsurpassed sense of character, The Bungle Family grows on the reader like a fungus until, like all great art, it becomes a central reference point in one's way of understanding the world.
REVIEW BY DAN NADEL:
(from TCJ.com, 2014)
The Bungle Family deserves an audience - it is perhaps the most contemporary of the classic comic strips, with timing and dialogue situations that are oddly current in today's comedy culture. It's a great and funny and nasty and, in its way, beautiful piece of work.
REVIEW BY BILL BLACKBEARD:
(from Hogan's Alley #13)
As a work of narrative comic art, The Bungle Family effectively went unseen over its quarter-century span except on the daily and Sunday comic pages of American newspapers, with no shelvable record or cinematic adaptation of any kind. Yet the strip appeared in hundreds of papers with virtually no drops from its early years through the '40s, when Tuthill closed it down to almost universal protests from readers and editors, yielding to their entreaties once for a revival run of a few years, then retiring it firmly in 1945 for good. (For two more decades, Tuthill lived quietly as the wealthy squire of tiny Ferguson, Mo., relishing his days away from drawing-board demands, never knowing the attention that still unborn comic-strip fandom would have brought him from the ’60s on—and perhaps not caring.)
FURTHER READING:
