Nut Brothers

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Nut Brothers

By Gene Ahern

When a Sunday Our Boarding House strip was launched in 1932, Ahern reintroduced the Nut Brothers as a topper strip. And the stupendous, luminous semi-surrealsm began yet again – these are still more tremendous works, a true highlight of the 1930s Sunday comic sections.

Then, in 1936, Ahern was lured away by Hearst to abandon Our Boarding House and the Nut Brothers but Ches and Wal, now denuded of their names for contractual reasons, jumped over to The Squirrel Cage – among the most titanic creations in the entire history of comics. I have, of course, already provided a hefty run of this classic, and it can be found elsewhere on this blog.

But the Nut Bros were popular enough to be continued as what we nowadays would call a ‘legacy strip,’ by the hand of several other cartoonists, most of them uncredited – the only one who was able to put his signature on the strip was Bill Freyse, in the last few years of the strip. The Nut Bros had enough of a following that, even after the era of Sunday topper strips came to an end, it was spun off to become an independently running strip. And it was to last all the way up to 1965 – outliving its original creator Ahern by a good five years.

As Major Hoople became more and more successful, Ahern gave Our Boarding House more of his attention; the literature says that well before the end of its run, he had turned over the Nut Brothers to a ghost artist.

Thanks to Jeff Nelson

Nut Brothers 1921-1922

Newspaper Comic Strips

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