Comic Strip History - Jiggs Dinner

This is a short follow-up to my previous post.

Last month, while researching Dinty Moore specifically and Bringing Up Father generally, I came across a phrase I hadn't heard before, "Jiggs Dinner." Like Dinty Moore, it was apparently also derived from the work of George McManus. Unlike Dinty Moore, it's not very widely known outside of a very specific area, that area being Newfoundland, Canada, but it is quite well known within that area, among other places.

Jiggs Dinner (or sometimes Jiggs' Dinner), in current day Newfoundland, is a dish consisting of a base of corned (or salt) beef and cabbage and some other greens, various root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and turnips, and a side of pease pudding. Other vegetables of various sorts can also be added if one wishes. Similar dishes can be found in the United States, such as New England Boiled Dinner, which is essentially the same but without the pease pudding, and in Ireland, where they have Bacon and Cabbage, which again is essentially the same but with a different meat. The Irish variety was most likely the precursor to these types of meals, as it's thought that Irish immigrants to the United States and Canada, not being able to afford bacon, would substitute the more readily available corned beef, and thus invented the American version of the Irish classic. Newfoundland has a large population of people of Irish descent, so it stands to reason that such a meal would endure as a tradition among them.

Of course, it also stands to reason that, in the early 20th century, they would be quite fond of a newspaper comic about an Irish immigrant who loves corned beef and cabbage.

As stated in the previous post, Bringing Up Father was known worldwide in its heyday, and its two main leads, Jiggs and Maggie, were so well known that most people referred to the strip by their names rather than by its title. Jiggs' penchant for going to Dinty Moore's cafe and having a bite of corned beef and cabbage was also well known, of course. To the consternation of the cartoonist, George McManus, it was also assumed that he was just as fond of it as Jiggs was. This was only partially true. In the Collier's Magazine article referenced in the previous post, he states that, "It is true that, like Jiggs, I have some fondness for this simple and succulent dish. But I can take it or leave it. Through the years, I have become rather selective about it, because it has been rammed down my throat on every possible occasion from Maine to California. Does McManus come to town on a King Features promotion tour? Every place he visits has stockpiles of corned beef and cabbage waiting."

Due to the clear association between Jiggs and corned beef and cabbage (or "C.B. and C." as I often saw it abbreviated in old newspapers), it didn't take long for people to start referring to the dish as simply "Jiggs Dinner." The earliest article I could find which referenced Jiggs Dinner was from a New Brunswick, Canada newspaper in 1918, where it states that a certain business executive had been "host at a Jiggs dinner at his summer home." The lack of explanation of what a Jiggs dinner is implies that readers would have already been familiar with the term by that time, which is interesting, given that Bringing Up Father had only debuted 5 years prior.

However, the term was not confined only to Canada at this early stage. I found the term in many American newspapers across the country in the 1920s, either reporting that someone had hosted a Jiggs dinner or was planning one, or advertising meat markets, grocery stores, and restaurants where one could buy one (my favorite of these being from a restaurant in Norfolk, Virginia which advertised a Jiggs dinner "of surpassing excellence").

Of course, at that time the term referred only to the corned beef and cabbage itself, not necessarily to a meal with corned beef and cabbage in it. Still, it's fairly easy to see how, given that the dish is centered around corned beef and cabbage, Newfoundlanders would also refer to their traditional dish in the same way. Since the 1930s and 1940s, I found that the term began to be used less and less outside of Canada generally and Newfoundland specifically, though it hasn't gone away entirely. Judging by current newspapers at least, it's still a popular way to refer to corned beef and cabbage in the Midwestern United States, most especially Ohio.

Jiggs Dinner in the Canadian Encyclopedia

Jiggs Dinner at the Grammarphobia blog

Jiggs Dinner in NUVO Magazine

"My First Jiggs Dinner" at Parts Unknown

"Jiggs Dinner for Beginners" at the official Newfoundland and Labrador tourism website

"Why do we call it 'Jiggs dinner,' anyway?" at CBC

Comic Strip History - Dinty Moore

Once again, coming to you from the "I had no idea how complicated this would be when I started" department, we have Dinty Moore, the well known brand of canned soups and stews from the Hormel company. The Dinty Moore brand has included a number of different Hormel products over the years, but the best known is, of course, the beef stew. Some in the know, such as myself, may be aware that a comic strip character of the same name existed prior to the launch of Hormel's brand, but even they may not know exactly how the name made it from the newspaper onto the can. I certainly wasn't aware of all the complexities, until now.

In 1913, cartoonist George McManus launched the comic strip "Bringing Up Father," which he wrote and drew for William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper, and which was syndicated to newspapers across the country by what would later become known as King Features Syndicate. While it isn't well remembered now, it was very popular in its day, and by the end of its first decade had already spawned several stage plays, live action and animated movie shorts, and multiple reprint book collections. By the time McManus died in 1954, the strip had been syndicated and reprinted in book form worldwide, there had been several live action movies, and McManus had earned over 12 million dollars from the strip. In short, the strip and its characters were very widely known around the world in the early to mid 20th century. After 1954 it was taken over by one of his assistants, Zeke Zekley, and ran all the way to the end of the century, ending in 2000.

The strip mainly revolved around a family of Irish-Americans, comprised of the titular father Jiggs, mother Maggie, and daughter Nora. In many places, these characters were more well known than the title of the strip, prompting many to simply call it "Jiggs and Maggie." This was also the title given to a number of the live action movies, such as "Jiggs and Maggie In Court" and "Jiggs and Maggie Out West."

While they had come from a working class background, Jiggs and Maggie had come into possession of a large amount of wealth, and the strip chronicles their struggles with adjusting to the new lifestyle that said wealth brings with it. Maggie and Nora both excitedly take to the high society life, while Jiggs is dragged kicking and screaming into it. Many of the strip's gags revolve around Jiggs trying to continue to be his working class self, and cavort with this working class friends, to the embarrassment of his wife and daughter.

One of the other major recurring characters that everyone knew was, of course, Dinty Moore. In order to get away from high society life, Jiggs would most often attempt to abscond to the local restaurant and pub owned by Dinty, who was his friend. In his first appearance in 1913, Dinty was a waiter at a fancy restaurant in France. There was a series of strips that recounts the family's trip to Paris, and in one of them they visit said restaurant. Jiggs recognizes the waiter as one of his friends, Dinty Moore, and is excited to see someone he knows from America. Maggie and Nora, on the other hand, were disappointed they weren't able to impress a local waiter with the French they had learned. Dinty would somehow make his way back to America, and end up running the pub near where Jiggs and family lived.

In an article he wrote for Collier's Magazine in 1952, George McManus recounted how he came up with the character of Dinty Moore. As a young boy, McManus had known an Irishman who worked as a bellhop at a hotel in St. Louis, and who was named Dinty. He remembered and used this name when he created his new character, and gave him the last name Moore, because "it seemed to go with it."

However, there was another man George McManus knew who had a different idea of where the name and the character came from.

McManus was a frequent patron of a restaurant in New York owned by two brothers, William and James Moore. McManus was acquainted with James, who was familiar with his various comic strips. In the aforementioned Collier's article, McManus even states he had introduced several of his friends to the restaurant, including people he worked with at the newspaper. Moore had never spoken with McManus much, but as soon as Moore saw there was a character in the comic strip called Dinty Moore and who owned a pub, he immediately assumed it was a reference to him. The Collier's article doesn't make it clear whether McManus confirmed or denied this to Moore, but either way, Moore did not hesitate to use it as a marketing tool. He changed the name of the establishment to "Dinty Moore's" and also started calling himself Dinty Moore, after the character. Either due to the association with a popular comic strip, or due to Moore's marketing prowess, or both, it became a very popular place for anyone visiting that side of New York to go. During Prohibition, it was well known as a speakeasy, and was frequented by various celebrities, as well as the police, though not always for the same reasons.

Due to the popularity of the New York restaurant, and the comic strip, other Dinty Moore's restaurants began opening in various places in the country as well. Some sources claim that James Moore himself opened up a chain of them, though many of them seem to be unrelated. I couldn't find any evidence to suggest he was aware of all of them, but King Features Syndicate certainly was. An article I found from the Winchester (KY) Sun recounts the tale of two brothers who bought a restaurant there and renamed it Dinty Moore's, but in order to do so had to get permission from the syndicate (then called International Feature Service). I couldn't find much in the way of legal challenges to these restaurants, but it's clear that it did happen.

In a certain case, however, it did not seem to happen at all, and that case is what would lead to the canned stew.

In 1888, Charles Witt opened up a new grocery store in Minneapolis, MN called "Witt's Market House." In 1919, it moved to a new location, where it would stay until it closed down in 1968. Witt's store carried all types of grocery items, but they specialized in meat products. After Witt came up with a new method of curing hams using brine and a "secret solution", in 1925 they began marketing these hams under the brand name Dinty Moore. Witt's became an institution in Minneapolis at that time, and Dinty Moore hams became their signature product. It wouldn't take long for them to start marketing other meat products under the Dinty Moore brand as well, and by 1935 the name Dinty Moore was firmly associated with meat in the minds of much of the populace of Minneapolis. Witt even had the Dinty Moore name trademarked for use with marketing meat products.

Roy Witt, one of Charles' sons, was friends with Jay Hormel, the son of George Hormel, founder of what would later become known as the Hormel Foods company. One day in 1935, as Jay was showing Roy their new warehouse in Austin, MN, he mentioned the fact that a government contract to can beef had fallen through, leaving them with a bunch of empty cans they had nothing to do with. Roy suggested that instead of just canning beef, they add some vegetables and turn it into stew, and even suggested he use Witt's Dinty Moore brand to market it. An agreement was made between Hormel and Witt, and Dinty Moore Beef Stew was born. Witt's never expanded beyond downtown Minneapolis and eventually had to close due to lower and lower demand for their products, and the Dinty Moore trademark was eventually fully taken over by the Hormel company. The brand has continued ever since, and it's difficult to go to the soup aisle of any grocery store and not see it.

Now, I don't have definitive proof of where Witt got the name Dinty Moore from, or why they decided to market their meat products under that name. I couldn't find any statements from Charles Witt or his sons about how they came up with it. However, I feel that the uniqueness of the name, the popularity of the comic strip, and the heavy association of the name with restaurants and food makes it very easy to connect it to the comic strip character. The name was definitely in the zeitgeist. Hormel, of course, didn't take it directly from either the comic or the restaurant, but Witt most likely did take it from one or both of those things, and passed it on to Hormel. Also, while it seems like they shouldn't have been able to trademark the name if they had taken it from someone else, as we saw with Skippy, trademark law in those days was not nearly as robust as it is now.

Thankfully, unlike Skippy, this story doesn't have any kind of tragic ending for the cartoonist. McManus never owned the copyright to the strip or to the characters, so he never felt the need to litigate. In my research, I found references to legal challenges from King Features, but I wasn't able to find when any of these challenges took place, so I'm skeptical of their existence. Even if they did happen, clearly they didn't amount to anything, and since King Features has never sold any food products, the court would most likely rule they weren't in direct competition. For McManus's part, Bringing Up Father made him a very wealthy man, and though he lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, he had gained it all back by the time of his death in 1954. ...

For More Information:

Bringing Up Father at Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Dinty Moore's in Winchester, KY from the Winchester Sun

James Moore obituary where he's called "Real Dinty Moore"

Dinty Moore at Food Timeline

Take Corned Beef And Cabbage, by George McManus, from Collier's Magazine, January 26, 1952

On Strips: Bringing Up Father at Kleefeld on Comics

Witt's Market House at Hennepin History Museum

"Remember Witt's?" Page 11 and Page 13 from the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Comic Strip History - The Grawlix

In times past, when I've covered words or phrases that originated in a comic strip, generally they had a major effect only on the English language, and sometimes only American English. This time, however, we have something that appears to have affected multiple cultures and languages across the world, even while still remaining entirely unpronounceable. Everyone has seen it, and it's immediately recognizable. It's a series of punctuation marks and symbols that indicate someone or something is emitting profane or vulgar language (for example, "@&%$!"), which these days is most commonly known as a grawlix.

The first appearance of a grawlix, that we know of, was in a strip called Lady Bountiful, drawn by Gene Carr, published on November 1, 1901. Ruldolph Dirks, creator of the Katzenjammer Kids, is often cited as the first to use a grawlix, but examples of this in Dirks' work can't be found until a year after the Lady Bountiful strip. However, the popularity of the Katzenjammer Kids was certainly instrumental in popularizing its use. Given that one of the main characters of the strip was a ship captain, and the strip would often feature other characters who were sailors, they cursed just like them, too. Such cursing would, of course, be "censored" by the grawlix.

In the earliest uses, all types of symbols were included, not just punctuation marks, though the exclamation point was very common and was generally expected to appear. Other common symbols were five-pointed stars, spirals, skulls, and in the case of Dirks' sailors, an anchor. Grawlices have mainly been used in comic strips with a more humorous tone; they have always exuded a certain air of whimsy, so they may seem out of place in a strip with more serious drama. Still, they can bring a more fun and comedic air to an action and adventure strip, and cartoonists such as Harold Gray, in Little Orphan Annie, and Chester Gould, in Dick Tracy, were not afraid to employ them from time to time.

It wouldn't take long for this to become a convention in not only newspaper comics, but also comic books. In the modern age, it seems the grawlix has broken free of comics entirely, and can often be seen in various textual media, everywhere from published books to social media posts. While I'm not an Internet historian, I can also imagine it being very useful even from the early days of the Internet, back when the only way to send information of any kind was through the use of text. Further, because of the nature of it, the grawlix isn't restricted to use within any particular language. People around the world are able to use it and still be understood. In fact, the official emoji for an angry person using profanity (🤬) (officially known as "serious face with symbols covering mouth") has a censor bar with a grawlix on it.

But where did the word "grawlix" come from?

In 1946, columnist Charles Rice in the newspaper supplement tabloid This Week wrote a humorous column titled "Squeans, Plewds, and Briffits, or How to Be A Cartoonist," in which he presented several visual conventions of comic strips along with the names of such. The column was written in a way that suggested these words already existed and were in use among cartoonists, though Rice had made them all up himself. There was, however, no mention of a grawlix in Rice's column. At that time and since, one can find others using words and phrases such as "cursing characters" or "obscenicons," but "grawlix" had not yet been invented.

Enter Mort Walker.

Clearly inspired by Rice's column, Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, wrote a column for the National Cartoonists Society magazine The Cartoonist entitled "Let's Get Down To Grawlixes." This column, published in 1964, cites Rice as an inspiration and includes all of the words he coined in his article for This Week, but goes even further by coining terms for many other visual conventions of the comics medium, including the grawlix. Of the grawlix, Walker wrote:

In his book Mort Walker's Private Scrapbook, Walker says this article was originally meant to only be a joke, but his son Brian convinced him to expand the idea into an entire book. In 1980, this would become the seminal reference work for all of these comic words, The Lexicon of Comicana.

As a side note, despite citing Rice as an inspiration in the The Cartoonist article, in Private Scrapbook Walker claims to have invented all of the words he included in the Lexicon which, as has been shown, is not true. Many of the words both in the The Cartoonist article and in the Lexicon were borrowed from Rice, and in the Lexicon Walker even recreated Rice's illustrations of plewds and squeans, complete with Rice's captions. That said, in his book Backstage At the Strips, Walker begins by writing, "If the stories in this book are not exactly told the way they happened, it's the way they should have happened if God had been a better gagwriter -- or if I'd had a better memory." So I guess that applies to Private Scrapbook as well.

But I digress. In The Lexicon of Comicana, in a section of the book titled "Maladicta," Walker introduces the grawlix and its relatives in a way similar to their introduction in the The Cartoonist article:

It's interesting to note that, in both the The Cartoonist article and in the Lexicon of Comicana, Walker names a number of different profanity replacements consisting of various shapes and symbols, the grawlix only being one of many. A jarn appears to include only spiral type shapes, a nittle includes various star shapes, and a grawlix appears to only consist of formless squiggles. Yet, "grawlix" would be the word that would come to describe all of these varying maladicta over the course of time. This may have been because it's the most interesting and memorable of the words, or perhaps because Mort Walker himself decided to lump them all together at some point. I can't be sure.

Whatever the reason, by 2018 dictionaries had begun to take notice of widespread enough use of the word that they started including it. Webster's added it in 2018, the official Scrabble dictionary added it in 2022, and the venerable Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2025.

For more information:

Obscenicons A Century Ago and More on the early days of obscenicons at Language Log

Grawlixes Past and Present by Gwillim Law

Charles Rice's column in This Week at Weird Universe

Backstage At The Strips and Mort Walker's Private Scrapbook at The Internet Archive

What the @#$%&! Is a Grawlix? at ThoughtCo.

What the #@*% is a ‘grawlix'? at Merriam-Webster

Why Cartoon Characters Curse Like This at the Vox YouTube channel

Grawlix and the Lexicon of Comicana at A Way With Words

Unexpected Comic Strip Creators - Charles Addams

Charles Addams is best known as the creator of The Addams Family, a group of strange, monster movie adjacent characters who first appeared as cartoons in The New Yorker magazine.

The magazine first began printing cartoons by Addams in 1932, and he joined the cartooning staff of the magazine in 1935. Certain recurring characters who would later be associated with The Addams Family began appearing in his cartoons in 1937, but it wouldn't be until the next year that he would collect them together into a recurring feature titled "The Addams Family". In 1964, when the television show based on said characters debuted, they would finally be given names, which were provided by Addams himself.

Since 1964, the Addams Family has appeared in TV shows, animated cartoons, movies, and streaming series, but around the 1950s the main place to see them, or any other Charles Addams cartoons, was either in The New Yorker, certain other magazines like TV Guide or Colliers, or in books collecting his work. If you looked for it in the newspaper you would be very disappointed. That was, until 1955 when the McClure Syndicate began publishing a weekly black and white panel by Charles Addams titled "Out of This World" (which I have mentioned before). There isn't much information available on this, but here's what I could find.

In Allan Holtz's book "American Newspaper Comics," he lists the panel as running only in 1956, though I was able to find it running a bit earlier in December of 1955, and ending in December 1956. I also found it running in the British magazine Tatler for a period of 75 weeks, which means it had to have run in the newspaper for more than a year. It ran weekly, on Sundays, though it was printed only in black and white, much like Addams New Yorker cartoons.

While I can't say for certain, it stands to reason that these were rejected New Yorker cartoons that Addams still particularly liked, so he wanted to see them published somewhere. I also imagine that McClure syndicate figured Addams was an established enough name that newspapers would buy the panel based on that alone. All of this is speculation, but when looking at the panels themselves, it's hard to distinguish between the ones that were printed in the newspaper and the ones printed in the magazine.

Further, some of the Out of This World panels include characters that look very similar to Addams Family characters, such as Pugsley and Uncle Fester.

This brings me to another interesting point: In researching this, I came across the Charles and Tee Addams Foundation, who are "dedicated to advancing the artistic achievement of American cartoonist, Charles Samuel Addams," from a comment left on a blog post by one of its members, H. Kevin Maserocchi. He states that he is aware of 65 of these cartoons which were published in newspapers, though somehow it also ran in the Tatler magazine for 75 weeks. Further, many the originals are owned by the foundation and are displayed at exhibitions. This is interesting, given the lack of information available from the foundation about the syndicated strip. If the foundation is aware that they were printed in newspapers, one would think they would acknowledge that fact somewhere on their website, given the amount of information they do provide on Addams' life and career.

Yet, it is nowhere to be found. The biographical timeline doesn't mention Out of This World, and there's no mention of it in the biographical sketch. The timeline does list the 1957 publication of “Nightcrawlers,” a collection of Addams cartoons, which included some from Out of This World, but it does not mention the strip.

So, Miserocchi's comment implies that, while they are aware of the strips, and they are valued just as highly as the magazine cartoons, they have not displayed, republished, or reprinted them with any recognition of their status as newspaper comics. They are treated the same as the rest of his work. Which brings me back to my earlier statement: it would be hard for a layperson to distinguish these cartoons from his other work, and it seems it's either just as hard for the foundation to do so, or they have just decided not to.

I can't say I'm extremely bothered by this, because I think newspaper comics should be valued as highly as other comic works and art works, but it's just interesting that there is no acknowledgment. It would be nice for there to be some, given how difficult it is to find mentions of the newspaper strip anywhere. The definitive biography of Addams, "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life" by Linda H. Davis, doesn't mention it at all. Even the Wikipedia page only mentions it in passing, with no citation.

All that said, I feel like this lends credence to the idea that they were rejected New Yorker cartoons. If they were originally meant to be in a certain publication, it makes sense to continue to associate them with other cartoons that ran in that publication.

For more information:

Out of This World panels at Ink Spill blog. Of particular note is the comment from H. Kevin Maserocchi

The Addams Family at Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Charles Addams at Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Charles Addams at Lambiek Comiclopedia

Out of This World in Tatler magazine at Attempted Bloggery blog

Charles Addams biographical timeline at the Charles and Tee Addams Foundation

Unexpected Comic Strip Creators - Stan and Jan Berenstain

Stan and Jan Berenstain (not Berenstein, and no we will not be discussing the Mandela Effect today) are of course best known for creating the series of children's books The Berenstain Bears. Books in the series have been published since the 1960s, and are still published now, overseen by Stan and Jan's son Mike. A much less well known fact is that the Berenstains had a fairly long cartooning career prior to creating the Bears, even creating a syndicated newspaper comic.

Despite both growing up in Philadelphia, and at one point even living in the same neighborhood, they didn't meet until they were college students, on the first day of drawing class at what was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (later called University of the Arts, and which sadly closed down in 2024). Shortly thereafter, they would be separated by World War II, as Stan was drafted into the Army, but they would still put their artistic abilities to use. Much of Stan's time in the Army was spent at a hospital as a medical illustrator, making detailed drawings of soldiers who had undergone facial reconstruction surgery. As you can imagine, the work could be quite unpleasant, so to keep things light he created cartoons featuring a bumbling, incompetent soldier character called Oglethorpe, which would end up getting published in several Army newspapers. Not satisfied with just being published in Army publications, he also sent some cartoons to a magazine called the Saturday Review of Literature, and was paid $35 per cartoon (which, by 1940s standards, was pretty good, especially for a soldier).

While Stan was in the Army, Jan also contributed to the war effort as a riveter, as well as a mechanical illustrator for the Army Corps of Engineers. When Stan returned home in 1946, they were so happy to be reunited that they were married less than two weeks later. Encouraged by Stan's earlier success at selling cartoons to a magazine, the two decided to become a cartooning team and submit to as many magazines as they could.

They were not met with very much initial success. No major magazine wanted to buy their work. They were able to consistently sell to the Saturday Review of Literature, but mostly because the cartoons they submitted were mainly about art and literature. In his book on their early cartooning work, their son Mike recounts a meeting that Stan had with an editor of The Saturday Evening Post. He asked Stan if he had ever actually read their magazine, and when Stan replied that he had, the editor said he found it quite surprising given the kinds of cartoons that he sent in. He praised the overall quality of the work, but said that what they wanted was cartoons about families and parents, not art and culture. With this in mind, Stan and Jan decided to be a bit more targeted in their humor, to appeal to the audience that read the magazines they were trying to sell cartoons to.

The Berenstains weren't parents yet, so their ability to write jokes from the perspective of a parent was limited. Around this time, they took jobs as instructors at the Settlement School in South Philadelphia. Their experience at the school, as well as thinking back to many of their own experiences as children, inspired them to write jokes from the perspective of kids. Unlike their previous batches of cartoons, these proved to be far more popular, and major magazines such as the aforementioned Saturday Evening Post and Collier's began buying them. One cartoon editor suggested that it would also be good publicity at family magazines to reinforce that they were a husband and wife team, so they began signing all of their work "The Berenstains." This new direction helped them go from selling to only one or two no-name magazines to regularly selling to the biggest names in the business.

A lot of their success came from Collier's Magazine, where they gained popularity for a series of full page cartoons which depicted large scenes of groups of children playing in various ways, such as at recess, on a frozen lake in winter, and in the school gym. In addition to the interiors, they were able to get many cartoons on the cover of the magazine, which only increased their notoriety. This led to their main output being for Collier's, and their cartoons becoming a regular feature in every issue. A popular recurring character in their Collier's cartoons was a young girl named Sister, a tomboyish, no-nonsense type reminiscent of Little Lulu or Nancy. She has over the years often been compared to Dennis the Menace, though she predates him by a couple of years.

Around this time, in 1951, the Berenstains were also contacted by book publisher Macmillan, who asked them to do a book of cartoons about parenting. They had a child and were parents by that time, and where therefore able to pull from that experience to create a book called "The Berenstains' Baby Book." Multiple similar humor books followed, including a collection of the Collier's Sister cartoons. While their cartoons of that era didn't have very many recurring characters, Sister was certainly their most popular. This led them to consider doing something they had never done before, which was submit the cartoons for syndication at a newspaper.

The comic strip "Sister" was picked up by Register and Tribune Syndicate, and the first strip ran on April 6, 1953. While their magazine cartoons were generally a single panel, the daily newspaper comics were always two to three panels, and of course several more on Sundays. This was the case for the first year, at least. In July of 1954, the dailies switched to a single panel format, though the Sundays continued to be multiple panels. This is kind of a shame, because I think the Berenstains did a better job when they had the space to build up to a punchline rather than just immediately deliver a gag. Comic strip historian Allan Holtz has a low opinion of the strip, and thinks many of the gags were actually "recycled" from Dennis the Menace, though I think Sister has a different kind of charm to her than Dennis does. He also notes that she seems to be misnamed, given that she's an only child, which I can't argue with.

Unfortunately, most readers and newspaper comics editors had much the same opinion as Holtz, as Sister never ran in very many papers over its lifetime. Advertisements for the new strip in newspapers always mentioned the Berenstains' magazine cartoons, clearly hoping to pull in some of the magazine readers, but this didn't seem to do much to increase readership. After a short while, Stan and Jan found that the amount of time and effort put into the strip was not worth what they were getting out of it. The strip ended after only 3 years, on April 15, 1956.

After this, their newspaper career was over, and they would never syndicate a comic strip again. They immediately went back to working at Collier's, though that magazine also ceased publication at the end of 1956. Afterwards, they created a recurring magazine feature "It's All In The Family," which first ran in McCall's and later Good Housekeeping, until it ended in 1988. The first Berenstain Bears book was published in 1962, and would of course spawn the series of books that eclipsed all of their previous cartooning work. Sister wasn't the last time they would attempt a syndicated newspaper comic, however. According to a listing from Editor & Publisher magazine in 1982, a comic strip based on the Berenstain Bears was at one point under development and set to be syndicated by King Features, but never came about.

For more information:

Child's Play: The Berenstain Baby Boom, by Mike Berenstain, Stan and Jan's son

Sister at Stripper's Guide

The Berenstains at The Daily Cartoonist

Team Berenstain part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 at the Berenstain Bears Blog

Berenstain cartoon books, early magazine cartoons, and Sister from Collier's Magazine at Mike Lynch's blog

More on the Berenstain cartoon books at Berenstain Bears Collectors

Offline/Banner image I was commissioned to do by the Twitch channel SaltCommittee

See it on my portfolio site:

https://portfolio.arkholt.com/

Lynn Johnston on her writing process

From Hogan's Alley #1:

TOM HEINTJES: What method do you use to write？ LYNN JOHNSTON: I write dialogue the way you would for a sitcom. I put the family in a situation, and I exist as a phantom in the room, and I hear them speak and I watch them move, and I follow them around, and I wait for the things to happen. Some things I coerce into happening, and some things happen spontaneously. I often never know where this completely independent family is going to take me. The stories often write themselves. It's a wakeful dream state. Mike Peters says the same thing. Even Joan Rivers admitted the same thing. When you're writing, it's like you're under a general anesthetic, where you'll wake up and say, "I don't believe it -ー the sun went down!" It's like a state of suspended animation. You are transported into a dream state so your body exists as a shell during the time you're writing. When the character April was born, a group of eight of my women friends decided to give me a surprise baby shower, and the day they planned it was a writing day. I was sitting in my studio, and my studio overlooks our driveway. Four cars pulled into my driveway, and people walked into my living room, and I still didn't know they were there. One of the women walked into my studio and said, "Lynn, there's something I want to show you." I said, "Hi Beth, how are you?" not noticing that someone had walked into my house. When she led me into the living room, I had to blink several times before I could adjust to the fact that my living room was full of balloons and friends and gifts! That's how anesthetized you are. When I draw, I can talk to a friend, I can listen to the radio, I can talk on the phone, because it's like dancing to a tune I've loved to dance to before. TOM HEINTJES: So you're never just walking through the mall when a gag comes to you. LYNN JOHNSTON: Sure! And when that happens, it's wonderful. More than likely, it's the state of mind you' re in. There are times when I intend to write and nothing happens. Then there are other times when I have the flu and I feel crummy and depressed, and I write two weeks' worth of stuff. About two weeks ago, I came up with 11 Sunday comics in one day! And you wonder, if there is some spiritual connection here, where were you guys last week? I like complete quiet when I write, though. I have to have no interruptions. I can't work if there's background noise. Well, that's not always true. We live in a forest, and there were a number of trees that were dead, and they were in danger of falling over onto the house. So we had a couple of guys come over and take them down. They chainsawed all those trees as I wrote, and I didn't see them and I didn't hear them. I went outside later at about two o'clock and said, "Holy smoke, look at all the trees you cut down! They said, "You were right there by the window the whole time!" And I never even was aware of any of it ー- the noise, the chatter, the trees falling, nothing. But that's unusual. Normally I have complete quiet. If I played a radio, I'd hear snippets of conversation or song lyrics that would distract me.

Lynn Johnston on the reader response to the Lawrence "coming out" storyline in For Better Or For Worse

TOM HEINTJES: How is your mail running, now that a large part of sequence has run? LYNN JOHNSTON: At this point, it's overwhelmingly supportive. The negative letters have been very angry or very religious. One very fine letter came in from a very religious lady who told me that I was misguided, and that with love and understanding, she wanted me to know that. She hoped I'd find peace in Jesus. I thought that was a wonderful letter. I really appreciate this lady, because she was still loving and kind and accepting of me, no matter what my beliefs were, and that to me was wonderfully valid. But then you get letters from people who say, "Do you realize that all serial killers are homosexual?" One hysterically funny letter came from a man who was in his 60s, and he began by explaining what an upright, Christian man he is, and that he doesn't believe in a debauched lifestyle, and if I only knew what these people did to each other, I would be so disgusted and repelled that I would never consider socializing with them. And he added that what they did was so horrific that he didn't want to even think about it, and then he followed it with four pages of detailed descriptions! I've gotten very few letters from people who are gay. I think the people who will be particularly affected by this story are waiting until it's over before they say whether or not it was good. For the most part, I'm hearing from families, psychiatrists, doctors, teachers, very open-minded people who are saying, "Good ー- we have left this in a closet for far too long, and it's time we allowed people a life." And I've gotten letters of support from people of all ages. There are teachers who are going over this a day at a time with their students, with the approval of the students' parents. They're writing and phoning to tell me that it's an educational tool. One letter was from a mother who said that because of the strip, her son had the courage to tell her that he was a homosexual, and because of the strip, she had the courage to handle it well. I also got a letter from a woman in Edmonton who said that if the strip had run last year, perhaps her son would still be alive, because then he would know that he was not the only one in the world with this problem. It's that kind of response that makes me think it's been worth the rollercoaster ride it's put me on. It would be so much easier not to make a statement, not to tell a story, to continue to be that yellowing page on the refrigerator.

Lynn Johnston on wanting her work to be meaningful

From Hogan's Alley 1:

LYNN JOHNSTON: ...I never thought that I could do this. I never applied for this job. I never sent anything in and said, "Hey, check this out, give me a job." When I signed a contract at Universal Press Syndicate, the people around that big rosewood table were interested in celebrating. They wanted to take me out to lunch, but I went back to the hotel and -- swear to God -ー got physically ill. TOM HEINTJES: You realized what you'd gotten yourself into. LYNN JOHNSTON: How could I produce material every day, 365 days a year? How could I do that? I could see producing a book now and then, but a daily comic strip? I was going to have readers every day who would expect a certain level of quality work, and I think that maybe that's why I segued into the little vignettes that have moralistic and motherly values, like little parables. I might not be able to have a joke every day, but I could have a thought every day. When you're very young, you often find yourself completely devoted to something, whether it's Elvis Presley or a father figure or whatever. You become a cult member of some sort. And when I was very young, I wanted to be married to a minister. I didn't want to be a minister, but I wanted to be the wife of one, because I wanted to write his sermons. I was about eight years old, and I would lie in bed and pray, "Please, God, make me a minister's wife," because I wanted to write something that would mean something to people! I was brought up believing that everyone was bathed in sin. You would arrive at church, the day would be beautiful, the birds would be singing, everything would smell like fresh morning dew, and you'd feel great! And when you walked out after the service, you'd feel like you had nailed some poor sucker to a cross! "Wait a minute! I was happy until I came here!" [laughter] And I don't think spiritual guidance necessarily means shredding your self-confidence and destroying your day. You should come out of church wanting to carry on and care about people, pursuing your dreams and being positive. And when I was that little girl, I wanted to write pieces for that audience that would lift them up and make them feel great! And do you know what？ TOM HENTJES: Yeah in a very real way, you ended up doing just that. LYNN JOHNSTON： And I never even married a minister! [laughter]

Lynn Johnston on subtlety in For Better or For Worse

TOM HEINTJES: Even from the earliest days of For Better Or For Worse, when the strip was still evolving, to its current incarnation, you've managed to bring a lot of what I would call subtlety into a medium that is generally not known for its subtlety. One of my favorite strips you've done was the Sunday where Elly was standing on the patio brushing her hair, reminiscing about how she used to watch her mother do the same thing, and all the while Elizabeth is watching Elly. It was so understated and poignant, and I think the reason it stayed with me is because comics have traditionally not dealt well with subtle themes and topics. LYNN JOHNSTON: I think maybe it's because I'm a girl. [laughter] There are so many men in the business who are good at the comedy part, but the subtle, gentle, nuance part, you don't see that much. I think Brian Bassett, who does Adam, is very capable of that. I think Sparky [Charles Schulz] does that. I do it. Cathy Guisewite is far more brazen, but you'll see that gut-wrenching insight in Cathy. They have their finger on that sensitive pulse. They make you say, "Yes, I know how that feels." It's not necessarily funny, but it's real.

Lynn Johnston on drawing as a child

From Hogan's Alley #1, Fall 1994:

TOM HEINTJES: Did you devise any sort of escape mechanism for the life you had? LYNN JOHNSTON: I was very reclusive. I spent hours and hours in my room drawing. That was my other release, and that was my way of surviving. You see, anything I imagined, I could draw. And I found that if I was in a terrible depression and I closed my eyes, the blackness would appear to go on forever. But if I put it down on paper, it was no bigger than 8 ½ by 11, and I could deal with that. If you have a horror inside of you, it goes down to your marrow. But on paper, it's not so bad. TOM HEINTJES: So drawing became a form of therapy. LYNN JOHNSTON: It was a way to survive. If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper. ［laughter］ If I wanted to draw funny pictures, I would draw them, and I remember loving watching my brother laugh at them. My brother was a great audience, and if he liked the picture, he would laugh and laugh and laugh, and he would want to keep the picture. Making people laugh with an image I had created ... what power that was!

Comic Strip History - Gary Larson and the Thagomizer

As with most things I do research on, this one turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would.

Gary Larson is the cartoonist behind the very successful single panel comic The Far Side. The panel was syndicated in newspapers from 1980 to 1995, and some newer material appeared on the official website between 2020 and 2023. The humor is often described as "off the wall" and "surreal," though many times it can be incredibly relatable. Many of the jokes involve animals, and Larson was especially fond of using insects and prehistoric animals to tell his jokes. He also often used cavemen along with the prehistoric animals, which is of course historically inaccurate, but when the joke is funny enough it can be forgiven. That said, despite the historical inaccuracy, Larson has been praised by biologists for his attention to detail when it came to drawing the animals, especially the insects, and has gained a following among paleontologists from his many depictions of dinosaurs. In fact, he has amassed quite a following over the years in the scientific community at large, despite never being a part of it himself.

However, this is not to say that he was recognized by scientists immediately, or is enjoyed by all scientists equally, as will be shown.

On May 27, 1982, Larson published a comic depicting a group of cavemen attentively watching a presentation given by another caveman on the anatomy of the Stegosaurus. The caveman in the front points to an image of the Stegosaurus and says, "Now, this end is called the thagomizer... after the late Thag Simmons," indicating the spikes on the end of the tail. This also implies that said Thag had an unfortunate encounter with the tail spikes of the Stegosaurus, and the cavemen had named them in his honor. For many years this was just a joke, probably enjoyed by a majority of readers, and a contingent of paleontologists, but still simply a joke and nothing more. It would remain so for a little over 10 years, until a certain paleontologist decided to take the joke a bit further.

In September of 1993, at the Fifty-Third annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Kenneth Carpenter gave a presentation on a stegosaurus skeleton that had, at that time, been recently discovered. Up to that point, there were theories about what the tail spikes would have been used for, among them the idea that they were used for defense against predators, but there was no fossil evidence to back any of them up. At this meeting, however, Carpenter suggested that the particular stegosaurus skeleton on display showed evidence that the tail spikes had been used as a defensive weapon against a predator, as one of the spikes had been broken off. Carpenter also remembered the Far Side cartoon, which suggested a stegosaurus had used its tail spikes as a weapon against Thag, so he dubbed them "thagomizer" in honor of Larson. While this was not conclusive evidence of the nature of the usage of the thagomizer, later discoveries, including that of an allosaurus skeleton with a thagomizer spike embedded in it, led much more credence to this idea.

Following Carpenter's lead, other paleontologists began using the term in professional settings, and over the years it has been used in more and more places. Though it never became an official term for the Stegosaurus tail spikes, it is currently in use by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, the Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, and even in the exhaustive dinosaur reference book "The Complete Dinosaur."

That said, not everyone in the paleontology community embraced this term quite as readily. In fact, there are some who are actively against it.

A perusal of the Internet will reveal that many people mistakenly believe that "thagomizer" is the official term for the stegosaurus tail spikes, which it unfortunately is not. There are those, mostly stegosaurus researchers, who take great pleasure in pointing out that not only is this not true, but that such an "official term" doesn't exist. Dr. David Hone said as much in a reply to a Reddit post about the origin of the word, and went on to say that "most paleontologists don't use it," though when presented with contrary evidence he did go on to admit that many do. Dr. Susannah Maidment, in a profile of her on the website for Utah's Natural History Museum, says that she doesn't use the term because "paleontology already has more than enough jargon," and that simply using the phrase "tail spikes" will do. In fact, in a reply to a Twitter thread about the origin of the word, Dr. Maidment stated that not only is it not a word used by paleontologists, but "No self-respecting palaeontologist has ever used the word." Later tweets in the thread suggest that Dr. Maidment may also have asked those who publish papers on stegosaurs to remove the word from them before publishing. It seems she had also stated that there were no peer-reviewed published papers that had used the word, but it's unclear whether no one had, or that no one had been allowed to.

Whatever the case, it's clearly a very popular word among non-professional dinosaur enthusiasts, as well as those of a more professional persuasion. So, while Larson can't be credited with coining an official term, coining a popular colloquialism is still notable. Personally, I'm a fan, and I think fun words like thagomizer should be more common in science. If someone has an issue with "thagomizer," I would suggest looking up the origin of the word "quark."

That's not the only way that the scientific community has shown their appreciation for Gary Larson, either. Biologist Dale Clayton, when he discovered a new species of owl louse, named it Strigiphilus garylarsoni, "in appreciation of the unique light [Larson] has shed on the workings of nature." Also, in 1991, Kurt Johnson named a species of butterfly after Larson, Serratoterga larsoni, though the species was later merged with another one and the genus name was changed. This does mean that the louse is the only one that stuck, but of having a louse named after him, Larson has said, "I considered this an extreme honor. Besides, I knew no one was going to write and ask to name a new species of swan after me. You have to grab these opportunities when they come along."

For more information:

Watch Out For That Thagomizer! at Smithsonian Magazine

Gary Larson profile at Salon.com

Thagomizer in The Complete Dinosaur at Google Books

David Hone refuting the official-ness of the word on Reddit

Dr. Susannah Maidment profile at Natural History Museum of Utah

Susannah Maidment replies to a tweet about the Thagomizer on Twitter

...and a further Maidment reply

Unexpected Comic Strip Creators - Matt Groening

I've been hesitant to write about this, because I'm not entirely sure how unexpected it is. I prefer to write about creators whose comic strip careers have been completely and entirely shrouded by whatever else they've done. I've always felt like Matt Groening's career prior to The Simpsons was well known, at least among fans of his, so I never felt a need to touch on it. That said, as the years go on, I have seen The Simpsons and Futurama continue to be remembered and referenced while Life In Hell, Groening's newspaper comic, has slightly faded into obscurity. So, I thought I ought to shed a bit more light on it.

Life In Hell was a comic strip that ran from 1980 to 2012, primarily in alternative weekly newspapers. It began life in 1977, as a comic book that Groening photocopied and sent to his friends, with various gags about how horrible it is to live in Los Angeles. He attempted to get some of his comics published in the LA Weekly without success. In 1978, he successfully had it published in the magazine Wet, but it didn't last long there. After working at the LA Reader for a while doing various jobs, he showed some of his comics to the editor, James Vowell. Vowell liked his work, and began publishing the strip in the back of the paper in 1980. After some initial success in the Reader, Groening was able to convince several other newspapers to run the strip as well. While working at the Reader he met Deborah Caplan, who later became his first wife. By his own admission Groening was not very good at self-syndicating, and asked Caplan to assist. Eventually the two of them would start the Acme Syndicate, which initially syndicated not only Life In Hell, but also Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek and cartoons drawn by John Callahan. Barry would later decide to syndicate herself, and Callahan would later be syndicated by a former Groening employee, leaving Life In Hell as the only strip at the Acme Syndicate. Larger, more mainstream syndicates expressed interest in the strip as well, though they would generally ask for some of the material to be changed, which Groening refused to do. This did nothing to halt its success, however. Even though at that time you couldn't see it in any mainstream publications, it was in nearly every alternative newspaper you could find.

This popularity within the alternative press is precisely what led to Groening's animation career. Groening was initially approached to do an animated adaptation of Life In Hell, but was apprehensive due to having to give away licensing rights to the strip. Rather than jeopardize any future opportunities to license Life In Hell, he created The Simpsons, which first ran as short animations on the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987 and later became a standalone animated series beginning in 1989.

The Simpsons became very popular fairly quickly, and would of course become one of the most successful animated shows in history. Despite this, Groening continued to produce weekly Life In Hell strips and at that time promised to never give it up, as it was "his foundation." In fact, the success of The Simpsons led to more success for Life In Hell. While major syndicates had previously hesitated to print the strip in its original form, now that his work had been generally accepted among mainstream audiences they were willing to run it without alteration. Groening did make one concession, which was to not use profanity, but the content was otherwise the same, and several mainstream newspapers began running the strip in the mid- to late 90s.

His work on Life In Hell also crossed over with his work on The Simpsons in some ways. Several episodes of the show include references to the strip. In 1993, when Groening started a comic book company to publish comic books based on The Simpsons, among other properties, he named it Bongo Comics after the main character of Life in Hell, Bongo. The strip was clearly very important to him, even as it took a backseat to The Simpsons in most people's minds. When you read Life In Hell, however, you can understand why.

Life In Hell is clearly a very personal strip. While the characters in the strip are fictional, the situations are pulled from Groening's own life. As previously stated, the initial gags were all about his experiences living in LA, but later he would do gags relating to his childhood, being married, and having a child of his own, as well as some of his struggles working in television and in Hollywood. The humor is dark and sometimes depressing, and I personally find it difficult to read. That said, I can imagine that many people can relate to it and that it was therapeutic for him to draw and write. His childhood clearly was very rough, with abusive parents and siblings, and his adult life in many cases seemed very difficult for various reasons. One can understand, then, why he would want to continue doing it despite his success with other media and the dwindling newspaper market. It was a thing that he did for him, that he could control completely, and he wanted to create something of that sort.

Despite this, the strip ultimately came to an end in 2012. At least as early as 2009, Groening had stated that he didn't think the strip would last much longer, due to changes in the alternative press market as well as his ever increasing television and movie workload. Groening had apparently made attempts to publish his strips on the Internet as far back as 1998, but none of those attempts ever bore any fruit. There are fan-made archives of his work on the Internet, however.

For more information:

Life In Hell at Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Matt Groening at Lambiek Comiclopedia

Rob Rodi on Life In Hell from The Comics Journal #114

Matt Groening article in TV Host, from 1989

Excerpts from a Matt Groening interview with Gary Groth, from The Comics Journal #141

Matt Groening interview in Flux Magazine, from September 1995

Matt Groening interview in Mother Jones, from March/April 1999

Matt Groening interview with CNN, from February 2009

USA Today article on the strip ending

Life In Hell references in The Simpsons, up to 2014

McFadden's Row of Flats, December 27, 1896

We end this December 2024 as we began it, with another Yellow Kid. Like before, there's always so much to see in these comics. You might see some bad, unsightly things, but there are a lot of good things to see here as well, much like the year that has just passed. Hopefully this next year will have fewer of the bad things and more of the good.

Happy 2025 everyone.

Professor Otto and His Auto, December 28, 1902

George Herriman is of course most well known for his masterpiece of a comic strip, Krazy Kat, but prior to the Kat's kreation creation Herriman penned several other strips which lasted for varying amounts of time. Professor Otto and His Auto lasted less than a year, beginning in March 1902 and most likely not lasting into 1903. Today's comic is probably the last Professor Otto strip that ran.

The strip was, as the title suggests, about a professor and the various things he does while in his automobile. I guess one thing he really enjoys is running into things with it, so his resolution is to only run into snowmen from now on. It seems causing emotional trauma to children is preferable to causing physical harm to people, at least in his mind. Mistaking Henry for a snowman and plowing into him, causing Henry to beat him to a pulp, is possibly why Professor Otto did not return for another strip.

Ever Happen To You, December 28, 1959

As a kid, when you get socks or underwear or clothes of any kind for Christmas, it can be a major disappointment. Maybe getting a cool new jacket or some neat graphic t-shirts or something could be fun, but socks are always boring. Socks with fun patterns on them are disappointing, too, because it just feels like a boring thing that's trying too hard to not be boring. Extra points off if they're Christmas themed, because in reality those are socks you can't even wear until next Christmas.

Contrast this with how some adults feel about getting socks. While it seems nearly all socks made for kids are basically the same, and all you really worry about is if they will fit or not, adult socks come in so many different shapes, sizes, textures, and fabrics that getting some good ones as a gift can actually be exciting for some people. So when adults give kids socks, they may not actually be thinking about how the kid would feel about getting them and are mostly thinking about how they would feel. This, of course, leads to the Aunt Eloises of the world giving the Sonnys of the world socks for Christmas. If you are an Aunt Eloise, perhaps next year you should consider giving those socks to your adult siblings, and get something more fun and exciting for your nieces and nephews.

Texas Slim, December 25, 1955

I'm just reading between the lines here, but I get the feeling Colonel Beef was trying to keep the boys from leaving because he either was aware of the surprise party being planned, or planned it himself. It's a shame they didn't get to be there, but I hope the colonel had a good party with the rest of the folks even in their absence. Dalton deserved to lose that 47 cents, though.