Bungles Bopped

Harry J. Tuthill tried about everything. He worked in a chair factory and as chief assistant can-washer in a dairy; peddled picture frames, baking powder and soap on the road; took a mail-order course in steam engineering; courted the belle of Springfield, Ill. ("Beautiful creature--she later married a brakeman.") He joined a street carnival as barker and sold the Perfesser's cure with a medicine show. In 1919 he became a comic-strip artist, began drawing The Bungles. By last week he was good & tired of that, too.

In the Bungles' heyday, they appeared in 250 newspapers, and netted their creator an estimated $60,000 a year. He bought an 18-room house, built along the lines of a moderate-sized hotel, on St. Louis' private, exclusive Portland Place, where he still lives. For a time, the Bungles formula seemed surefire: there was a good deal of POW, SOCK and WHAM to liven the adventures of shrewish Josephine and gullible George, whose chief vice was signing papers before he read them. But the Bungles' incessant quarreling, which would have exhausted any real life couple, eventually got too painful for the readers. The strip's newspaper clients dropped to 70 in 1942. Cartoonist Tuthill, as bored as everyone else, killed the Bungles. Eight months later, he started them up again, this time with three teen-aged children. He explained this extraordinary family expansion: "Anything can happen in wartime." Last week the Bungles stopped dead, in the middle of a quarrel (see cut). Cartoonist Tuthill, 59, may start a new strip. But no more Bungles: "George Bungle is old-fashioned in the same way a lady's hat gets oldfashioned. It is of good quality but the style isn't there."

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