Comic Strip History - Jiggs Dinner

2026-08-01

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.

Comic Strip History - Dinty Moore

2026-06-27

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.

Comic Strip History - The Grawlix

2026-04-25

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.

Unexpected Comic Strip Creators - Charles Addams

2026-02-20

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.

Unexpected Comic Strip Creators - Stan and Jan Berenstain

2026-01-30

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.

The Dropouts, December 31, 1971

2025-12-31