ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — January 21, 1925

· George McManus, 1925

Bringing Up Father — January 21, 1925
Four panels track the eternal McManus domestic battle: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche, is scolded by his imperious wife Maggie for chasing his roughneck friends, then thrown out the door. Outside, a neighbor confides that *his* wife is bawling him out too — Jiggs's dry reply closes the gag. McManus draws in a sinuous Art Nouveau line inherited from Mucha, his figures rounded and expressive, speech balloons integrated cleanly into the composition. Launched in 1913 and syndicated globally, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to sustain a cast across decades of dailies and Sunday pages — exactly the recurring-character, sequential-panel format that publishers would soon collect into proto-comic books, establishing the medium's commercial and visual DNA.

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