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.
Despite both growing up in Philadelphia, and at one point even living in the same neighborhood, they didn’t meet until they were college students, on the first day of drawing class at what was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (later called University of the Arts, and which sadly closed down in 2024). Shortly thereafter, they would be separated by World War II, as Stan was drafted into the Army, but they would still put their artistic abilities to use. Much of Stan’s time in the Army was spent at a hospital as a medical illustrator, making detailed drawings of soldiers who had undergone facial reconstruction surgery. As you can imagine, the work could be quite unpleasant, so to keep things light he created cartoons featuring a bumbling, incompetent soldier character called Oglethorpe, which would end up getting published in several Army newspapers. Not satisfied with just being published in Army publications, he also sent some cartoons to a magazine called the Saturday Review of Literature, and was paid $35 per cartoon (which, by 1940s standards, was pretty good, especially for a soldier).
While Stan was in the Army, Jan also contributed to the war effort as a riveter, as well as a mechanical illustrator for the Army Corps of Engineers. When Stan returned home in 1946, they were so happy to be reunited that they were married less than two weeks later. Encouraged by Stan’s earlier success at selling cartoons to a magazine, the two decided to become a cartooning team and submit to as many magazines as they could.
They were not met with very much initial success. No major magazine wanted to buy their work. They were able to consistently sell to the Saturday Review of Literature, but mostly because the cartoons they submitted were mainly about art and literature. In his book on their early cartooning work, their son Mike recounts a meeting that Stan had with an editor of The Saturday Evening Post. He asked Stan if he had ever actually read their magazine, and when Stan replied that he had, the editor said he found it quite surprising given the kinds of cartoons that he sent in. He praised the overall quality of the work, but said that what they wanted was cartoons about families and parents, not art and culture. With this in mind, Stan and Jan decided to be a bit more targeted in their humor, to appeal to the audience that read the magazines they were trying to sell cartoons to.
The Berenstains weren’t parents yet, so their ability to write jokes from the perspective of a parent was limited. Around this time, they took jobs as instructors at the Settlement School in South Philadelphia. Their experience at the school, as well as thinking back to many of their own experiences as children, inspired them to write jokes from the perspective of kids. Unlike their previous batches of cartoons, these proved to be far more popular, and major magazines such as the aforementioned Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s began buying them. One cartoon editor suggested that it would also be good publicity at family magazines to reinforce that they were a husband and wife team, so they began signing all of their work “The Berenstains.” This new direction helped them go from selling to only one or two no-name magazines to regularly selling to the biggest names in the business.
A lot of their success came from Collier’s Magazine, where they gained popularity for a series of full page cartoons which depicted large scenes of groups of children playing in various ways, such as at recess, on a frozen lake in winter, and in the school gym. In addition to the interiors, they were able to get many cartoons on the cover of the magazine, which only increased their notoriety. This led to their main output being for Collier’s, and their cartoons becoming a regular feature in every issue. A popular recurring character in their Collier’s cartoons was a young girl named Sister, a tomboyish, no-nonsense type reminiscent of Little Lulu or Nancy. She has over the years often been compared to Dennis the Menace, though she predates him by a couple of years.
Around this time, in 1951, the Berenstains were also contacted by book publisher Macmillan, who asked them to do a book of cartoons about parenting. They had a child and were parents by that time, and where therefore able to pull from that experience to create a book called “The Berenstains' Baby Book.” Multiple similar humor books followed, including a collection of the Collier’s Sister cartoons. While their cartoons of that era didn’t have very many recurring characters, Sister was certainly their most popular. This led them to consider doing something they had never done before, which was submit the cartoons for syndication at a newspaper.
The comic strip “Sister” was picked up by Register and Tribune Syndicate, and the first strip ran on April 6, 1953. While their magazine cartoons were generally a single panel, the daily newspaper comics were always two to three panels, and of course several more on Sundays. This was the case for the first year, at least. In July of 1954, the dailies switched to a single panel format, though the Sundays continued to be multiple panels. This is kind of a shame, because I think the Berenstains did a better job when they had the space to build up to a punchline rather than just immediately deliver a gag. Comic strip historian Allan Holtz has a low opinion of the strip, and thinks many of the gags were actually “recycled” from Dennis the Menace, though I think Sister has a different kind of charm to her than Dennis does. He also notes that she seems to be misnamed, given that she’s an only child, which I can’t argue with.
Unfortunately, most readers and newspaper comics editors had much the same opinion as Holtz, as Sister never ran in very many papers over its lifetime. Advertisements for the new strip in newspapers always mentioned the Berenstains' magazine cartoons, clearly hoping to pull in some of the magazine readers, but this didn’t seem to do much to increase readership. After a short while, Stan and Jan found that the amount of time and effort put into the strip was not worth what they were getting out of it. The strip ended after only 3 years, on April 15, 1956.
After this, their newspaper career was over, and they would never syndicate a comic strip again. They immediately went back to working at Collier’s, though that magazine also ceased publication at the end of 1956. Afterwards, they created a recurring magazine feature “It’s All In The Family,” which first ran in McCall’s and later Good Housekeeping, until it ended in 1988. The first Berenstain Bears book was published in 1962, and would of course spawn the series of books that eclipsed all of their previous cartooning work. Sister wasn’t the last time they would attempt a syndicated newspaper comic, however. According to a listing from Editor & Publisher magazine in 1982, a comic strip based on the Berenstain Bears was at one point under development and set to be syndicated by King Features, but never came about.
For more information:
Child’s Play: The Berenstain Baby Boom, by Mike Berenstain, Stan and Jan’s son
Sister at Stripper’s Guide
The Berenstains at The Daily Cartoonist
Team Berenstain part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 at the Berenstain Bears Blog
Berenstain cartoon books, early magazine cartoons, and Sister from Collier’s Magazine at Mike Lynch’s blog
More on the Berenstain cartoon books at Berenstain Bears Collectors
Thornsby was a single panel comic that ran from 1973 to 1975. It seems to be a bit of an obscurity, as I wasn’t able to find out much more than that, even from my usual obscurity sources. What I did find, however, is that Tom McLaren, the son of Thornsby cartoonist Fred McLaren, has collected all of his father’s work together into a book, which is available for purchase as print-on-demand on his website or directly from Lulu.
Looking at this panel in particular, it certainly seems like not much has changed in the 50 years since this was published. I think we could all do with a reread of A Christmas Carol. In fact, I think everyone needs a little more Charles Dickens in their life at any time of year (and here’s a good place to start).
Ralph Dunagin was an editorial cartoonist for the Orlando Sentinel who also worked on a few syndicated comic strips. He wrote gags for “Grin and Bear It” and wrote for “The Middletons,” and he also wrote and drew his own syndicated comic. Originally titled “Tell It Like It Is,” it was eventually renamed “Dunagin’s People.” While never overtly political, it still touched on various social issues of the day.
I picked this one because it feels very much like a comic from 1974, given the popularity of the title “Ms.” at that time. I also really like the ambiguity of the gag. As “Ms.” is meant to not indicate marital status, it could be that a number of these women have just chosen to utilize a new title for themselves, or it could be that their marital status has changed. Being able to understand a joke on multiple levels is always an indicator of a well-written gag.
Henry is so ubiquitous when I’m searching through old newspapers for winter and Christmas themed comic strips that I was sure I had posted him in a previous December. After searching through my prior posts, however, I found that not to be the case.
Henry is often known as a pantomime strip, because the titular character doesn’t speak and neither do some of the other characters. This is not true of every character, though, as we see here with the candy shop man. The strip was created by Carl Thomas Anderson, and continued to be credited to him even after his death. Anderson died in 1948, and the Sunday version of the strip was taken over by his assistant, Don Trachte, who did the strip you see here.
It seems kids of every era were doing whatever they could to mimic adults and act more “grown-up.” Back in the days when cigarettes were advertised on television, if this strip is any indication, pretending to smoke was a popular thing to do. I sure hope they didn’t take up the real thing when they got older, though.
Cicero’s Cat began as a topper strip to the venerable Mutt and Jeff. The character of Cicero was the son of Mutt, and the topper originally focused on Cicero himself. The cat, named Desdemona, proved to be more popular than her owner, and eventually the topper was focused entirely on her. In fact, she proved to be so popular that often the topper would be printed separately, apart from Mutt and Jeff, though it never officially became its own strip. Since Desdemona doesn’t speak, or even “think speak” like Snoopy or Garfield, it also became a pantomime strip as can be seen here. Mutt and Jeff was created by Bud Fisher, though Al Smith often assisted, and upon Fisher’s death in 1954 Smith took over both the main strip and the topper.
I’ve never lived anywhere near any kind of pond or lake that regularly freezes over in the winter, so I’ve never been out on ice like in this strip, but even if I did I don’t think I would be brave enough to press my luck like Desdemona does here. If she had just done some ice dancing on the lake then perhaps she would have been fine. Unfortunately, you know what they say, curiosity about the sturdiness of ice dumped the cat into freezing water (or something like that).
Herman (still by Clyde Lamb and not by Jim Unger) is a comic strip I haven’t revisited in a while, so here’s another one. To be clear, I have nothing against Jim Unger’s Herman, but I just find Lamb’s Herman to be more interesting and funny. Plus, Jim Unger doesn’t have nearly as wild of a life story as Clyde Lamb does. To make a long story short, Lamb started his art career while in prison for the third time. The first time, he was arrested for armed robbery but was able to escape. The second time, he was arrested for armed robbery again and his wife tried to help him escape and was caught, but he was able to successfully escape at a later time. He was arrested and put in prison for the third time due to his previous prison escapes. He learned art and began to draw cartoons during his third prison sentence, and after he was released in 1947 he started drawing the comic strip Herman, which debuted in newspapers in 1949. He was never imprisoned again after that, thankfully. Herman ran until Lamb’s death in 1966.
Today’s wintery strip is nothing nearly as exciting as all that. It’s just a shrewd apple salesman finding ways to make money while still keeping warm. A baked apple does sound like it would be a nice treat on a cold day.
The Old Home Town seems to be a cross between a hillbilly strip like Li’l Abner or Snuffy Smith and a nostalgic single panel comic like Out Our Way. The cartoonist, Lee Wright Stanley, was from Kansas and was familiar with the rural folk of that region, and wrote what he knew. The strip ran from 1923 to 1966, and apparently coined a number of catchphrases that were popular during that period, though they didn’t have much staying power because I haven’t heard any of them in my lifetime. An article from 1939 states that the strip popularized such phrases as “Hold ‘er Newt, she’s arearin’,” “Git fer home, Bruno,” “Just ez I thought,” “Effen it’s news to you –,” and “What’s the fuss?”. Some of them just seem like normal phrases anyone could have come up with, so this may require further research.
As for this particular panel… All I have to say is, can’t he at least hold it in front of a fire for a bit before putting it on? Putting it on right off the line sounds like hypothermia waiting to happen.
Even though it was one of the lesser known Disney comic strips, Scamp ran for an impressive 33 years, from 1955 to 1988, with the Sunday strip running almost as long, from 1956 to 1988. The character first appeared at the very end of the movie Lady and the Tramp, as the child of the titular characters. It didn’t take long before he was appearing in a Dell Comics comic book series, and a few months later a newspaper strip, both of which debuted the same year as the movie. It wasn’t until 2001 that Scamp would get his own direct-to-video movie, though given the track record of Disney direct-to-video, I imagine the comics were of a higher quality.
Here, we see Scamp’s friend Cheeps complaining about the cold, though if a bird is cold even in its nest then it probably wasn’t built properly in the first place. Though, from my understanding, that’s the gimmick behind Cheeps; he’s very bad at making nests. Maybe this year Scamp can lend some of his fur to Cheeps to line his nest with so he won’t be so cold.
I was recently commissioned to draw an offline/banner image for the Twitch channel SaltCommittee, featuring the four main members doing what they do. I think I captured their essences quite well. Take a look on my portfolio site:
LYNN JOHNSTON: I spoke to Garry Trudeau… He was very comforting, and he said, “If you want to make a statement, you have to make it with all honesty and truth and be comforted knowing that it was made with your own strong sense of values and truth.”
TOM HEINTJES: You’re handling this sequence so deftly and so honestly, with a perceptiveness that seems so authentic. I’m left wondering if you simply wrote it from out of your imagination.
LYNN JOHNSTON: I didn’t. I wrote it from experience. My brother-in-law is gay. It certainly has not been by design, but so very many of my friends have been gay, all the way through school, art school, even in my husband’s dental class — our very best friend, who graduated with Rod, was gay and is now HIV-positive. He’s been thrown out of his home. We’ve been part of the private lives of so many people who have had to deal with this. I know this story. I know it’s a true one, and I know the dialogue by heart.
TOM HEINTJES: That explains why it seemed so palpably real.
LYNN JOHNSTON: It is real. That’s why I can stand tall and know that I am not making up a story simply to shock people. I produced a story that is so true that it’s painful. You know what it’s like? It’s like lancing a boil and taking out the thing that won’t allow it to heal. Not that I intended to do that, but I had the confidence that I could tell this story from the side of the people who had experience. In that way, I was being very true to myself, my strip and to them. The strip’s always been very honest.
TOM HEINTJES: How is your mail running, now that a large part of sequence has run?
LYNN JOHNSTON: At this point, it’s overwhelmingly supportive… For the most part, I’m hearing from families, psychiatrists, doctors, teachers, very open-minded people who are saying, “Good ー we have left this in a closet for far too long, and it’s time we allowed people a life.” And I’ve gotten letters of support from people of all ages. There are teachers who are going over this a day at a time with their students, with the approval of the students' parents. They’re writing and phoning to tell me that it’s an educational tool. One letter was from a mother who said that because of the strip, her son had the courage to tell her that he was a homosexual, and because of the strip, she had the courage to handle it well. I also got a letter from a woman in Edmonton who said that if the strip had run last year, perhaps her son would still be alive, because then he would know that he was not the only one in the world with this problem. It’s that kind of response that makes me think it’s been worth the rollercoaster ride it’s put me on. It would be so much easier not to make a statement, not to tell a story, to continue to be that yellowing page on the refrigerator.
LYNN JOHNSTON: …I never thought that I could do this. I never applied for this job. I never sent anything in and said, “Hey, check this out, give me a job.” When I signed a contract at Universal Press Syndicate, the people around that big rosewood table were interested in celebrating. They wanted to take me out to lunch, but I went back to the hotel and – swear to God -ー got physically ill.
TOM HEINTJES: You realized what you’d gotten yourself into.
LYNN JOHNSTON: How could I produce material every day, 365 days a year? How could I do that? I could see producing a book now and then, but a daily comic strip? I was going to have readers every day who would expect a certain level of quality work, and I think that maybe that’s why I segued into the little vignettes that have moralistic and motherly values, like little parables. I might not be able to have a joke every day, but I could have a thought every day.
When you’re very young, you often find yourself completely devoted to something, whether it’s Elvis Presley or a father figure or whatever. You become a cult member of some sort. And when I was very young, I wanted to be married to a minister. I didn’t want to be a minister, but I wanted to be the wife of one, because I wanted to write his sermons. I was about eight years old, and I would lie in bed and pray, “Please, God, make me a minister’s wife,” because I wanted to write something that would mean something to people!
I was brought up believing that everyone was bathed in sin. You would arrive at church, the day would be beautiful, the birds would be singing, everything would smell like fresh morning dew, and you’d feel great! And when you walked out after the service, you’d feel like you had nailed some poor sucker to a cross! “Wait a minute! I was happy until I came here!” [laughter] And I don’t think spiritual guidance necessarily means shredding your self-confidence and destroying your day. You should come out of church wanting to carry on and care about people, pursuing your dreams and being positive. And when I was that little girl, I wanted to write pieces for that audience that would lift them up and make them feel great! And do you know what?
TOM HENTJES: Yeah in a very real way, you ended up doing just that.
LYNN JOHNSTON: And I never even married a minister! [laughter]
TOM HEINTJES: Did you devise any sort of escape mechanism for the life you had?
LYNN JOHNSTON: I was very reclusive. I spent hours and hours in my room drawing. That was my other release, and that was my way of surviving. You see, anything I imagined, I could draw. And I found that if I was in a terrible depression and I closed my eyes, the blackness would appear to go on forever. But if I put it down on paper, it was no bigger than 8 ½ by 11, and I could deal with that. If you have a horror inside of you, it goes down to your marrow. But on paper, it’s not so bad.
“I don’t know Bill [Watterson]; I’ve never talked to him. I wrote a foreword for one of his books, but I’ve never talked to him. Like I said before, we’re all individuals, and I dreamed of becoming a comic strip artist. I never thought about licensing or anything like that, but I was driving down the street one day and I saw a truck that had Yosemite Sam pasted on the back of the truck. And I thought, “People love cartoon characters, and the man who drives this truck loves Yosemite Sam enough to paste his likeness to the back of his truck.” What in the world is wrong with that? People love coffee cups and things, and if you can put the characters on TV, sometimes it’s just terrible, but if you can do it [well], fine. You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown is the most-performed musical in the history of the American theater, because we did it right, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Plus: I don’t think I’m a true artist. I would love to be Andrew Wyeth or Picasso… but I can draw pretty well and I can write pretty well, and I think I’m doing the best with whatever abilities I have been given. And what more can one ask?”
GROENING: I respect Bill Watterson’s resistance to all the offers to exploit Calvin and Hobbes, but I don’t think it would compromise him personally, and certainly not financially. I think people love his comic strip so much that they just want to participate in it in a greater way. And in our culture that means wearing your favorite cartoon character on a T-shirt. To me, a cartoon strip is merchandise, anyway, in and of itself.
GROTH: Just by virtue of the fact that it’s sold?
GROENING: Yeah. I don’t think that a comic strip is innately superior to a T-shirt.
[It would be difficult to find a statement about comic strips that I disagree with more.]
Kelly said people sometimes didn’t understand his work, even early on: “I remember being about three and drawing something; it really wasn’t anything more than a scribble. My aunt and other family members looked at it and asked what it was. At a loss for an answer, I responded that it was a cat. Everyone exclaimed how marvelous a cat it was, showing it around and praising it. I was distinctly puzzled at this reaction since even I could tell it didn’t look anything like a cat.”
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Walt, were you influenced by [George] Herriman at all; did you love his stuff?
KELLY: Not too much because, you know, that guy’s all by himself. I’ve just borrowed devices from him. He had animals and I had animals. I was more influenced by say, [Arthur] Frost, [Rube] Goldberg, [Tad] Dorgan, [T.S.] Sullivant. Really, those guys who worked on sports, or on the bamboozle of the American public, which I think is the greatest and funniest story in the world. Whereas George was a little gentle. He had his own thing, which can only be described as poetry, really. No, I’m not that gentle a person.
KELLY:… We’re in a hell of a lot of trouble now. We have a built-in comic named Agnew who is our vice president, and he has come out with a lot of things that are ripe for comment, and we’re in a stupid business where you have to wait six to eight weeks before you can say anything about him. The comic strip business is very American in that it is always safe. You have to lean over backwards to get yourself in trouble, and I lean over backwards fairly well. I would love to be saying something about Agnew now, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. Hell, I’ve had a year to wait for him to do anything, just about, and I’m not doing it. So this is how good my work is: I’m still confined to these things, to our practice of putting our strips out six to eight weeks after the news is off the bush, and this is not good. We as cartoonists should always be commenting on what the hell’s right in front of our noses all the time. That’s what Rube [Goldberg] did in the old days, and I don’t know, how many days did you have for your stuff, Rube, you didn’t turn it out every day, did you?
RUBE GOLDBERG: [from audience] Yeah, every day, yeah.
KELLY: But was it a one day release?
GOLDBERG: Yeah.
KELLY: You see, this was great, this stuff was right on the nose in teens and early ’20s. We can’t do that now.
[Garry Trudeau must have heard this and taken it as a challenge]
“The guy that I will not eat my words about is Jim Davis, who I think ought to go straight to hell on a greased pole. I think he’s evil. The content of his strip is horrible and mean and terrible. I think the characters in Garfield are the same jerks that are in the White House. Garfield is a Republican jerk – that’s what he always struck me as: this fat, grouchy – it’s just a horrible, horrible character, and I think Jim Davis is horrible himself for creating this. The licensing is obviously a huge a deal for him. Why this guy has become a sort of cultural hero, I’ll never figure out.”
“Basically, I’ve decided that licensing is inconsistent with what I’m trying to do with Calvin and Hobbes. I take cartoons seriously as an art form, so I think with an issue like licensing, it’s important to analyze what my strip is about, and what makes it work.
It’s easy to transfer the essence of a gag-oriented strip, especially a one-panel gag strip, from the newspaper page to a T-shirt, a mug, a greeting card, and so on. The joke reads the same no matter what it’s printed on, and the joke is what the strip is about. Nothing is lost.
My strip works differently. Calvin and Hobbes isn’t a gag strip. It has a punchline, but the strip is about more than that. The humor is situational, and often episodic. It relies on conversation, and the development of personalities and relationships. These aren’t concerns you can wrap up neatly in a clever little saying for people to send each other or to hang up on their walls. To explore character, you need lots of time and space. Note pads and coffee mugs just aren’t appropriate vehicles for what I’m trying to do here. I’m not interested in removing all the subtlety from my work to condense it for a product. The strip is about more than jokes. I think the syndicate would admit this if they would start looking at my strip instead of just the royalty checks. Unfortunately, they are in the cartoon business only because it makes money, so arguments about artistic intentions are never very persuasive to them.
I have no aversion to obscene wealth, but that’s not my motivation either. I think to license Calvin and Hobbes would ruin the most precious qualities of my strip and, once that happens, you can’t buy those qualities back…
I’m convinced that licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes. The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?” Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.
As I said, some strips lend themselves to certain merchandising projects better than others. I’m not condemning licensing across the board; I’m saying licensing doesn’t work for Calvin and Hobbes, and I want the freedom to do with the strip as I see fit.
Obviously, some cartoonists see things differently than I do, and that’s their right. My concern is that I be afforded the right to refuse licensing if I feel it hurts my strip. I think it is wrong that a syndicate should own characters it had no hand in creating, and that a syndicate should use that ownership to thwart the intentions of the cartoonist who did create the characters.”
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.
Despite both growing up in Philadelphia, and at one point even living in the same neighborhood, they didn’t meet until they were college students, on the first day of drawing class at what was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (later called University of the Arts, and which sadly closed down in 2024). Shortly thereafter, they would be separated by World War II, as Stan was drafted into the Army, but they would still put their artistic abilities to use. Much of Stan’s time in the Army was spent at a hospital as a medical illustrator, making detailed drawings of soldiers who had undergone facial reconstruction surgery. As you can imagine, the work could be quite unpleasant, so to keep things light he created cartoons featuring a bumbling, incompetent soldier character called Oglethorpe, which would end up getting published in several Army newspapers. Not satisfied with just being published in Army publications, he also sent some cartoons to a magazine called the Saturday Review of Literature, and was paid $35 per cartoon (which, by 1940s standards, was pretty good, especially for a soldier).
While Stan was in the Army, Jan also contributed to the war effort as a riveter, as well as a mechanical illustrator for the Army Corps of Engineers. When Stan returned home in 1946, they were so happy to be reunited that they were married less than two weeks later. Encouraged by Stan’s earlier success at selling cartoons to a magazine, the two decided to become a cartooning team and submit to as many magazines as they could.
They were not met with very much initial success. No major magazine wanted to buy their work. They were able to consistently sell to the Saturday Review of Literature, but mostly because the cartoons they submitted were mainly about art and literature. In his book on their early cartooning work, their son Mike recounts a meeting that Stan had with an editor of The Saturday Evening Post. He asked Stan if he had ever actually read their magazine, and when Stan replied that he had, the editor said he found it quite surprising given the kinds of cartoons that he sent in. He praised the overall quality of the work, but said that what they wanted was cartoons about families and parents, not art and culture. With this in mind, Stan and Jan decided to be a bit more targeted in their humor, to appeal to the audience that read the magazines they were trying to sell cartoons to.
The Berenstains weren’t parents yet, so their ability to write jokes from the perspective of a parent was limited. Around this time, they took jobs as instructors at the Settlement School in South Philadelphia. Their experience at the school, as well as thinking back to many of their own experiences as children, inspired them to write jokes from the perspective of kids. Unlike their previous batches of cartoons, these proved to be far more popular, and major magazines such as the aforementioned Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s began buying them. One cartoon editor suggested that it would also be good publicity at family magazines to reinforce that they were a husband and wife team, so they began signing all of their work “The Berenstains.” This new direction helped them go from selling to only one or two no-name magazines to regularly selling to the biggest names in the business.
A lot of their success came from Collier’s Magazine, where they gained popularity for a series of full page cartoons which depicted large scenes of groups of children playing in various ways, such as at recess, on a frozen lake in winter, and in the school gym. In addition to the interiors, they were able to get many cartoons on the cover of the magazine, which only increased their notoriety. This led to their main output being for Collier’s, and their cartoons becoming a regular feature in every issue. A popular recurring character in their Collier’s cartoons was a young girl named Sister, a tomboyish, no-nonsense type reminiscent of Little Lulu or Nancy. She has over the years often been compared to Dennis the Menace, though she predates him by a couple of years.
Around this time, in 1951, the Berenstains were also contacted by book publisher Macmillan, who asked them to do a book of cartoons about parenting. They had a child and were parents by that time, and where therefore able to pull from that experience to create a book called “The Berenstains' Baby Book.” Multiple similar humor books followed, including a collection of the Collier’s Sister cartoons. While their cartoons of that era didn’t have very many recurring characters, Sister was certainly their most popular. This led them to consider doing something they had never done before, which was submit the cartoons for syndication at a newspaper.
The comic strip “Sister” was picked up by Register and Tribune Syndicate, and the first strip ran on April 6, 1953. While their magazine cartoons were generally a single panel, the daily newspaper comics were always two to three panels, and of course several more on Sundays. This was the case for the first year, at least. In July of 1954, the dailies switched to a single panel format, though the Sundays continued to be multiple panels. This is kind of a shame, because I think the Berenstains did a better job when they had the space to build up to a punchline rather than just immediately deliver a gag. Comic strip historian Allan Holtz has a low opinion of the strip, and thinks many of the gags were actually “recycled” from Dennis the Menace, though I think Sister has a different kind of charm to her than Dennis does. He also notes that she seems to be misnamed, given that she’s an only child, which I can’t argue with.
Unfortunately, most readers and newspaper comics editors had much the same opinion as Holtz, as Sister never ran in very many papers over its lifetime. Advertisements for the new strip in newspapers always mentioned the Berenstains' magazine cartoons, clearly hoping to pull in some of the magazine readers, but this didn’t seem to do much to increase readership. After a short while, Stan and Jan found that the amount of time and effort put into the strip was not worth what they were getting out of it. The strip ended after only 3 years, on April 15, 1956.
After this, their newspaper career was over, and they would never syndicate a comic strip again. They immediately went back to working at Collier’s, though that magazine also ceased publication at the end of 1956. Afterwards, they created a recurring magazine feature “It’s All In The Family,” which first ran in McCall’s and later Good Housekeeping, until it ended in 1988. The first Berenstain Bears book was published in 1962, and would of course spawn the series of books that eclipsed all of their previous cartooning work. Sister wasn’t the last time they would attempt a syndicated newspaper comic, however. According to a listing from Editor & Publisher magazine in 1982, a comic strip based on the Berenstain Bears was at one point under development and set to be syndicated by King Features, but never came about.
For more information:
Child’s Play: The Berenstain Baby Boom, by Mike Berenstain, Stan and Jan’s son
Sister at Stripper’s Guide
The Berenstains at The Daily Cartoonist
Team Berenstain part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 at the Berenstain Bears Blog
Berenstain cartoon books, early magazine cartoons, and Sister from Collier’s Magazine at Mike Lynch’s blog
More on the Berenstain cartoon books at Berenstain Bears Collectors
