LOAC Essentials: The Bungle Family

LOAC Essentials Volume 5: The Bungle Family by Harry J. Tuthill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.

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