LOAC Essentials Volume 5: The Bungle Family

LOAC Essentials #5

by Harry J. Tuthill, Dean Mullaney (Editor), Paul C. Tumey (Introduction)

Art Spiegelman called The Bungle Family "the most underrated comic strip in our history." Bill Blackbeard wrote, "There has been nothing like it in comic strips since." Hogan's Alley magazine proclaimed, "The Bungle Family was about as wholly an adult comic strip as the field has ever known." Yet only sporadic examples of Harry J. Tuthill's masterpiece have been available to modern readers. This volume - collecting the complete 1930 dailies - remedies that situation. The strip revolves around a squabbling couple, George and Josephine Bungle, apartment dwellers who are constantly at odds with not only each other, but with their neighbors, landlords, relatives, and just about anyone who crosses their paths - constantly conniving and scheming for financial or social advantage, and trying to marry their daughter, Peggy, to a rich prospect (including the recurring con man, J. Oakdale Hartford, who figures prominently in this volume). The Bungle Family displays no visual panache; rather, it's Tuthill's deft ability to define characters and his engrossing writing style that is the strip's core. Perhaps no other comic strip better defines LOAC Essentials' mission to reprint the daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history in yearly volumes so we can have an experience similar to what newspapers readers had may decades ago - reading the comics one day at a time.

Genres: Comics, Comic Strips, Humor

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 2014

About the author

Harry J. Tuthill was an American cartoonist best known for his comic strip The Bungle Family.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOAC Essentials Volume 5: The Bungle Family collects the Bungle Family daily strips for the whole of 1930.

This was extremely my shit. The Bungle Family chronicles the missteps and misadventures of The Bungle Family: George, his wife Josephine, and their daughter, Peggy. George and Josephine are middle class social climbers and neither of them is exceedingly bright. My first impression of George was Bertie Wooster without a Jeeves and nothing he did in the ensuing 300+ pages did anything to dissuade me of that notion.

The Bungle Family is a darkly humorous portrait of middle class Americans in the 1930s, always looking to move up in the world, no matter the cost. Harry J. Tuthill has a sketchy, scratchy, style that works well to tell the stories but the real meat is in the dialog.

A year full of daily strips really only amounts to two stories: Pontoon Bungle, wiener king, comes to town, and Montgomery El Dorado becomes infatuated with Peggy Bungle, just as her ex-fiance Hartford Oakdale shoves his way back into the picture.

The stories are funny but slow burners. Again, I was reminded of Mr. PG Wodehouse. By the time Pontoon Bungle leaves town and Peggy calls off her engagement, respectively, you've gone through the wringer several times. There's lots of keen wordplay but mostly it's fortune hunting douchebags getting what's coming to them.

Five out of five stars. My only complaint is that I don't have decades of the Bungle Family in front of me so that I can continue reading.

[Daveya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, timeless satire of family life