The Press: Why Bertie!

The Gump family have been galumphing along in their daily comic strip for over 30 years. They first appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Chinless, blowhard Andy Gump, his long-suffering, last-wording wife Min, and their billionaire Uncle Bim became as familiar to millions of newspaper readers as the neighbors, and Andy’s anguished cry for help (“O, Mini”) was a byword of the ’30s. When a minor character called Mary Gold was heartlessly killed off (the first U.S. comic-strip figure to die), thousands of readers protested.

The Gumps were conceived, named (after a favorite family expression, “Don’t be a gump”) and lovingly nursed by the late Captain Joseph M. Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News and president of the Tribune-News syndicate. For turning out the immensely popular strip, the syndicate paid Cartoonist Sidney Smith a record $150,000 a year. The Gumps survived Smith’s death in 1935 (Cartoonist Gus Edson has drawn it ever since) and Patterson’s in 1946, but their following slipped and a number of newspapers dropped the strip.

Last month the Chicago Tribune evicted The Gumps from their original home. To replace them, Publisher Bertie McCormick, who mortally hates and fears the British, last week was running a comic strip from London’s Sunday Graphic. The newcomer: Artist William Timym’s Caesar, the wordless adventures of a dog of dubious paternity.