There’s a lot of good comics chat on Bluesky, in case you’ve not joined up and hang out there. Or maybe you signed up in the early days and haven’t been back — it’s worth dropping in sometime!
The cartoonist behind “Fluffy and Mervin,” Deb Perry, also an artist and comics history buff, asked this question that had a few people chatting, joking, guessing, and thinking:
I love a silly, nonsensical comics word, but Deb’s question about the word slumgullion sparked a little recognition in me. Was it historical sailor slang for liquor or grog (which was also real, btw)? Was it a soup? No, I thought, that’s Mulligatawny stew you’re half-remembering. Slumgullion sounds like a silly, made-up comics word. And, it has been used in comics as a silly-sounding word.
Like in this screwball newspaper comic strip, High Pressure Pete, signed SWAN by George Swanson. There are characters named the Slumgullions, and also a neighboring town, I think, by the same name. Sadly, I couldn’t read through the strip much to figure it all out. Someone really should reprint a collection of this strip! It has really fun drawing and some good jokes, even around 100 years later.
If I sound unsure about these facts, that’s because I’ve not heard of this strip. But praise from Paul C. Tumey that Swanson’s work is an excellent example of the Screwball school is high praise indeed. Paul’s book, Screwball! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny is a great resource for learning about the funny, pioneering newspaper comic strips. If you’re into the old comics at all, you should grab a copy of this important book if you’ve neglected thus far to get a copy.
Comic artists will grab any silly-sounding word and try to use it in their own way, whether their syndicate editors realize what it really means or not. (I’ve heard from one such newspaper comic editor who had to tell Jim Davis he couldn’t use “schmuck” in Garfield, but that’s another story.)
Back to our question! It’s here, in a comic strip titled Dick Dippy’s Uncensored War Diary, that we see the actual definition of slumgullion in action:
Digging back through online newspaper archives, I see slumgullion largely defined as a ground beef stew with tomatoes, often some pasta, and whatever else you feel like. Then, finding this article helped shed light on several corners, and perhaps gave us a lead on the humorous use we find in Deb Perry’s original question! Maybe you’ll spot it toward the end of the first column, too.
It makes sense that Mark Twain would use the word! The oldest use I found in print goes back to the Gold Rush days in California. It seems there were places in California named Ground Hog Glory, and a newcomer Slumgullion Bar had people laughing. There seems to be no place today known by this name, btw, which is too bad. But, Twain’s use does not surprise me. Humorists of old had some of those same instincts as the newspaper cartoonists of yesterday, and the better ones today. Of course, he’s going to find a funny word and latch onto it.
I also found other 19th-century uses that indicate a mess. One, which brought a euphemism for stew to mind, described a hillside collapsing into a muddy mess in a mudslide full of rocks and logs. But, it seems in Deb’s example, slumgullion might be a beverage, not a stew. So, what is Mark Twain’s experience with slumgullion in his classic, Roughing It, about his life in the western gold country?
He described it as a beverage thus:
“Then he poured for us a beverage which he called Slumgullion, ” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. He had no sugar and no milk — not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with.”
Mark Twain in Roughing It (1886)
Was the illustration that accompanies the text informed by Twain? He kind of described it as “pretend tea,” and here we see his mug steaming away! Is that the “Eminent Artist’s” interpretation, or did they have access to Twain to get it right?
No matter what, it’s a very funny drawing, and as a humorist and travel writer, it’d come as no shock to me to learn that Carl Barks, the genius behind the Donald Duck adventure comics Deb is so fond of, had read Twain. Barks wrote and drew all kinds of adventure stories, often citing his reading of National Geographic as his major reference and influence. Had he also read Mark Twain? Could this one silly drawing in Twain have inspired Barks?
Deb Perry shared a follow-up with some more pages and panels, which gives us the answer in light of what we learned along the way:
STEW
Oh, so it *is* a stew or soup Donald is cooking up for Pete. Yellow Beak just happens to already have a mug on the table when Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, serve him some slumgullion, and he downs it in a gulp. So, Carl Barks knew slumgullion was a soup or stew, *not* a drink, and very doubtfully inspired by Mark Twain.
If you want some recipes, there are several that accompany that article from 1985, which are instructive in their own right. Let me know if you find one you like.
For further reading:
Screwball: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny by Paul C. Tumey
Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, 1942 [Reissue 2025] by Carl Barks
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
