LOAC Essentials Volume 5: The Bungle Family 1930

Born May 10, 1885, in Chicago, in a family of six, Joseph Harold Tuthill left school in his mid-teens to become a traveling salesman and carnival barker. He settled in Missouri in 1903, in proximity to an attractive young lady. While that romance fizzled, he married Ethel M. Wilson not long after. The couple's first son, Joseph Jr., was born in 1907. Several years later, after working at a dairy to support his family and taking night courses in art at Washington University, Tuthill found a job as a political cartoonist for the St. Louis Star. Tragedy struck in 1915, when Ethel passed away due to complications during the birth of their second son, George.

In 1919, Tuthill—now signing his strips with the reversed name of "Harry J. Tuthill"—left his sons in the care of his late wife's family, accepting a job offer as a cartoonist for a large New York firm, the Evening Mail Syndicate, where he worked alongside cartoonist monolith Rube Goldberg. While in New York, Tuthill debuted Home, Sweet Home, a sarcastic gag-a-day strip featuring a quarrelsome couple that would eventually become The Bungle Family. Despite the commonplace subject matter, the strip distinguished itself with superb writing, slowing evolving a more darkly comic tone.

Following the death of his brother-in-law in the mid-1920s, Tuthill, now an established cartoonist, returned to St. Louis, where he bought a large estate to house his sons, sister-in-law, and nephew. Ironically, Harry Tuthill had become a huge success, all thanks to a comic strip about a family of chronic failures, lead by the henpecked George Bungle, who was named for his creator's younger son.

The Bungle Family peaked in the early 1930s—when there was even a serialised radio adaptation, The Puddle Family, and the strip was reputedly running in 300 papers—before the restless Harry began to steer the strip in increasingly odd directions. He incorporated elements of mystery and science fiction, including trips to space, the fourth dimension, and alien planets. Tuthill retired from cartooning in 1942, with the announcement that he had earned over a million dollars from the Bungles, only to revive the much-aggrieved family a year later when he started his own syndicate, a enterprise that lasted until 1945. The second retirement that followed was permanent. Tuthill declined slowly over the next decade, suffering from heart disease, which claimed him in 1957.