Grin and Bear It

This article is about the comic strip panel. For other uses, see Grin and Bear It (disambiguation).

For his Sunday feature, George Lichty often grouped four cartoons in this layout design of two horizontal cartoons between a circle and a vertical. (August 2, 1953)

Grin and Bear It was a daily comic panel created by George Lichtenstein under the penname George Lichty. Initially distributed by United Feature Syndicate in 1932, it was syndicated by Field Enterprises beginning in 1940. Field Enterprises was sold in 1984 to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation , which then in turn was sold in 1986 to King Features Syndicate which distributed the feature until its last episode on May 3, 2015.

Lichty created Grin and Bear it in 1932. Frequent subjects included computers, excessive capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy. Situations in his cartoons often took place in the offices of commissars or the showrooms of "Belchfire" dealers with enormous cars in the background. His series "Is Party Line, Comrade!" skewered Soviet bureaucrats, always wearing a five-pointed star medal with the label "Hero."

For his Sunday feature, George Lichty sometimes grouped four cartoons into a layout of two horizontal cartoons between a circular panel and a vertical panel. A similar approach was used by Fred Neher with the layout of gag cartoons on his Sunday Life’s Like That.

After Lichty, cartoonists who worked on the panel included Fred Wagner, Rick Yager and Ralph Dunagin. It received the National Cartoonists Society's Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award for 1956, 1960, 1962 and 1964. At the end of its run, it was drawn "by Fred Wagner and written by Ralph Dunagin". The last Saturday episode ran on May 2, 2015, and the last Sunday on May 3.

Lichty's cartoon style had a strong influence on the cartoons drawn by Joe Teller, as evidenced in the book, "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller—A Portrait by His Kid (2000) by Teller (of Penn & Teller).

Books

Lichty's cartoons were collected in three books, Grin and Bear It (McGraw-Hill, 1956), the paperback Grin and Bear It (Pocket Books, 1970) and Is Party Line, Comrade (Public Affairs Press, 1965).

Sources

• Strickler, Dave. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index. Cambria, California: Comics Access, 1995. ISBN 0-9700077-0-1

External links

• Don Markstein's Toonopedia
• National Cartoonists Society Awards