"Гамптар: Американдық комикстер тарихы"

American comic strip
the comic strip

The Gumps is a comic strip about a middle class family. It was created by Sidney Smith in 1917, launching a 42 year run in newspapers from February 12, 1917, until October 17, 1959. According to a 1937 issue of Life, The Gumps was inspired by Andy Wheat, a real life person Smith met through his brother. "Born forty seven years ago [i. e., in 1890] in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Andy Wheat acquired his unusual physiognomy as the result of an infection following the extraction of a tooth, which eventually necessitated the removal of his entire lower jaw. Through Dr. Thomas Smith of Bloomingdale, Illinois, a dentist and a brother of Sidney Smith, Wheat met the cartoonist, who saw in him an ideal comic character. Wheat subsequently had his surname legally changed to "Gump" to match the cartoon character. His wife's name is Min, and he has two children, Chester and Goliath, now living in San Francisco, and an Uncle Bim who lives in Georgia. Gump's home is in Tucson, Arizona, but he also has a farm near his birthplace in Mississippi."

The Gumps were utterly ordinary: chinless, bombastic blowhard Andy Gump (short for Andrew), who is henpecked by his wife, Min (short for Minerva); their sons Chester and baby Goliath (plus an unnamed daughter in college and an unnamed son in the Navy); wealthy Uncle Bim; and their annoying maid Tilda. They had a cat named Hope and a dog named Buck. The idea was envisioned by Joseph Patterson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who was important in the early histories of Little Orphan Annie and other long run comic strips. Patterson referred to the masses as "gumps" and thought a strip about the domestic lives of ordinary people and their ordinary activities would appeal to the average American newspaper reader. He hired Smith to write and draw the strip, and it was Smith who breathed life into the characters. Smith was the first cartoonist to kill off a regular character: His May 1929 storyline about the death of Mary Gold caused a national sensation. The Sunday page also included several toppers over the course of the run: Old Doc Yak (Dec 7, 1930 – Feb 25, 1934), Cousin Juniper (Jan 2, 1944–1955) and Grandpa Noah (1955).

The Gumps made its debut in an unusual way. Cartoonist Sidney Smith had previously drawn and written Old Doc Yak, a talking animal strip that sustained only a brief run. The very last Old Doc Yak strip depicted Yak and his family moving out of their house, while wondering who might move into the house next. On Thursday, February 8, 1917, the last panel showed only the empty house. On Monday, February 12, 1917, after the Gumps were introduced in the space formerly occupied by Old Doc Yak, they moved into the house formerly occupied by the Yak family. (Old Doc Yak would reappear as a topper for The Gumps Sunday page from 1930 to 1934.) The Gumps had a key role in the rise of syndication when Robert R. McCormick and Patterson, who had both been publishing the Chicago Tribune since 1914, planned to launch a tabloid in New York, as comics historian Coulton Waugh explained:
"So originated on June 16, 1919, the Illustrated Daily News, a title which, as too English, was almost at once clipped to Daily News. It was a picture paper, and it was a perfect setting for the newly developed art of the comic strip. The first issue shows but a single strip, The Gumps. It was the almost instant popularity of this famous strip that directly brought national syndication into being. Midwestern and other papers began writing to the Chicago Tribune, which also published The Gumps, requesting to be allowed to use the new comic, and the result was that the heads of the two papers collaborated and founded the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, which soon was distributing Tribune News features to every nook and cranny of the country".

As one of the earliest continuity strips, The Gumps was extremely popular, with newspaper readers anxiously following the convoluted storylines. By 1919, this popularity prompted an interest in film adaptations, and in 1920–21, with writing credited to Smith, animation director Wallace A. Carlson produced and directed more than 50 animated shorts, some no longer than two minutes, for distribution through Paramount. Between 1923 and 1928, Universal Pictures produced at least four dozen Gumps two reel comedies starring Joe Murphy (1877–1961), one of the original Keystone Cops, as Andy Gump, Fay Tincher as Min and Jack Morgan as Chester. Many of these shorts were directed by Norman Taurog, later famed as the leading director of Elvis Presley movies. In the comic strip, Sidney Smith had Andy run for Congress in 1922 and for President in 1924 and in practically every succeeding election, one of the first of many comic strip and cartoon characters to run for office. In 1924, Smith wrote his characters into a novel, Andy Gump: His Life Story, published in Chicago by Reilly & Lee. In 1929, when Smith killed off Mary Gold, she was the first major comic strip character to die, and the Chicago Tribune had to hire extra staff to deal with the constant phone calls and letters from stunned readers. The strip and its merchandising (toys, games, a popular song, playing cards, food products) made Smith a wealthy man. On his way home from signing a $150,000 a year contract in 1935, he crashed his new Rolls Royce and died. Patterson replaced Smith with sports cartoonist Gus Edson. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when actor Martin Landau was a cartoonist, he worked as Edson's assistant on The Gumps, eventually drawing the Sunday strips for Edson.