Fred Neher

Who was Fred Neher?

Fred Neher was an American cartoonist best known for his syndicated gag panel, Life’s Like That, which offered a humorous look at human nature, with a focus on American society and family life, for more than five decades.

Growing up in Nappanee, Indiana, Neher was 12 years old when he was paid $2.00 for doing a drawing of a woman hanging clothes with a new type of clothespin. While he was a student at Nappanee High School, he took the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course.

Neher succeeded in selling a cartoon to the popular humor magazine Judge before he graduated from high school in 1922. He furthered his art study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and after graduation, he worked as an assistant to cartoonist Arch Dale, doing lettering and backgrounds on Dale's comic strip Doo-Dads. Neher recalled:

Several years of work on this strip gave me experience enough to attempt my own strip, Otto Wall, a radio strip. A golf strip, Layon McDuff, came next, followed by Goofey Movies, an animal strip, and Just Like Us, a kid strip, which appeared in the first issue of Family Circle magazine and thereafter for four years. From 1930 to 1934, I freelanced to magazines, having some 40 markets, including Punch, the English magazine. I was the first American to sell to Punch in 20 years.