The Bungle Family: 1930

Availabel again, Harry Tuthill's masterpiece of remorseless social ambition, the daily strip Art Spiegelman (Maus) called "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 crucial to comics history in yearly volumes so we can have an experience similar to what newspapers readers had many decades ago--reading the comics one day at a time.