Life's Like That
Life's Like That was a gag panel by Fred Neher which found humor in life's foibles. Spanning five decades -- from October 1, 1934 to August 20, 1977 — the panel was initially distributed by Consolidated News Features, and later by the Bell-McClure Syndicate and the United Feature Syndicate. At its peak, Life's Like That was published in 500 newspapers.
Life's Like That
- Creator
- Fred Neher
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Documentary summary
Life's Like That was a gag panel by Fred Neher which found humor in life's foibles. Spanning five decades -- from October 1, 1934 to August 20, 1977 — the panel was initially distributed by Consolidated News Features, and later by the Bell-McClure Syndicate and the United Feature Syndicate. At its peak, Life's Like That was published in 500 newspapers.
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Documentary evidence
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Authority files
wikidata · Q6544531 · wikipedia · Life's Like That
In this article
The object
The object
The Sunday format gave several cartoons a free-floating grouping, with variations, including one arrangement similar to George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, displaying several square-shaped panels with one in a circle. When Neher died at age 98 in Boulder, Colorado in 2001, Owen S. Good wrote in the Rocky Mountain News: He is survived by pot-bellied businessmen, henpecked husbands, worldly-wise goldfish and babies with thin curlicues of hair, all actors in the everyday comedies he staged on the funny pages.
Key facts
Key facts
• Title — Life's Like That • Author — Fred Neher • Status — Concluded daily & Sunday • First — October 1, 1934 • Last — August 20, 1977 • Syndicate — Consolidated News Features (1934–1963) Bell-McClure Syndicate (1963-1972) United Feature Syndicate (1972-1977) • Genre — gag panel
Publication history
Publication history
Neher had drawn a comic strip, Goofey Movies, for five years (1925-1930), plus sales of gag cartoons to 42 magazines, including Collier's and The New Yorker, when the Bell Syndicate signed him on in 1934. Life's Like That was launched October 1, 1934, and ran until 1941 but disappeared from newspapers during World War II. As the war concluded, it returned by June 1945, running until 1977, when Neher retired. He stopped doing the Sunday half-page in October 1972. Doug Sweet, of The Montreal Gazette, recalled that his newspaper ran Life's Like That when it carried no other syndicated gag panels or comic strips:
Course of the series
Dated record
Course of the series
The full dated record · 1 entries
2004
Life's like that! (2004) is digitised and catalogued by Open Library.
Archives
Archives
• Illustration — Fred Neher's Life's Like That (October 6, 1968) During the 1950s and 1960s, Neher taught cartooning at the University of Colorado for 12 years, and he donated his Life's Like That cartoons to the University of Colorado Library Archives (where they fill 36 linear feet). As he described it, "Univ. of Colo. ask to have all my original drawings for safe keeping... came in a truck and left me only my shorts."
Documents and archives
Primary material
Documents and archives
reference work
- “Life's Like That”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q6544531: Life's Like That
Reputable secondary · Wikidata
Institutional database
- arXiv, Cornell University, preprints naming “Life's Like That”
Scholarly · arXiv (Cornell University)
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Holtz, Allan. American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. The University of Michigan Press. 235. 2012. 9780472117567.
- 2.National Cartoonists Society
- 3.Michael Maslin: The New Yorker Cartoonists, A-Z
- 4.Rocky Mountain News, September 26, 2001.
- 5.Bell Syndicate, Sunday color supplement, The San Bernardino Daily Sun, San Bernardino, California, Sunday 17 June 1945, Volume 51, page 23.
- 6.Morehead, Toni. "The Nappanee Six".
- 7.Sweet, Doug. "New comic strips getting a test spin", The Montreal Gazette, December 31, 2005.
- 8.University of Colorado: "A Guide to Manuscript Collections"
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
Institutional database
arXiv, Cornell University, preprints naming “Life's Like That”arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutional witnessreference work
Secondary witnessreference work
Secondary witness
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 16 August 2026.
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