CRUMBLING PAPER: Pussy Pumpkin and That Family Next Door

There are a number of old comic strips that I have scanned and cleaned up a bit that have not yet appeared on this site. I recently shared them with my friend Allan Holtz at his wonderful blog The Stripper’s Guide, and offered to let him post any of them he was interested in writing about. I’m much more interested in hearing what he has to say about them than what I would cobble together. Allan has a vast knowledge of comic strip history, and is currently working on an enormous encyclopedia indexing every American comic strip he has been able to see examples of in his many years of research.

So far he has posted two of the strips I scanned.

First of all, he posted an example of The Strange Adventures of Pussy Pumpkin and her Chum Toodles by Grace Drayton (creator of the Campbell’s Kids), which you can read about here.

I previously posted about Pussy Pumpkin here and here (the strip at the first link did not appear on the Stripper’s Guide).

Next he posted the example of That Family Next Door by Jean Knott which I posted previously here.

Here is what Allan said about that strip, and here is a follow-up post with more examples.

Crumbling Paper: That Family Next Door

Here’s a nice example I scanned of That Family Next Door from 1918 by Kuatt? Knott? Can anyone identify this cartoonist? It’s a pretty polished cartoon, and a funny one, so I would think this is likely to have been done by a known cartoonist. Note the similarity in title and theme to George Herriman’s wonderful The Family Upstairs.

UPDATE: Reader D.D. Degg in the comments let us know that this is by cartoonist Jean Knott, who also did the strips Penny Ante and Eddie’s Friends. Thanks D.D.! See examples of Penny Ante on Barnacle Press here. See an example of Eddie’s Friends on Shorpy here.

Click the image to view the full strip.