ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — 1925-01-29

· George McManus, January 29, 1925. Syndicated daily strip. King Features / Int'l Feature Service.

Bringing Up Father — 1925-01-29
Four panels: Jiggs's wife demands he wear a golf suit like other men; Jiggs, wincing, wishes it looked better on him. Alone on the street, he wonders aloud what the gang would say. Then Dinty Moore spots him — and in the final panel Jiggs slumps in a chair, mortified. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: florid Art Nouveau flourishes on the women's dress, rubbery silhouettes for Jiggs, and clean speech balloons carrying all the comic timing. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first newspaper strips with fully realized recurring characters and a domestic situation sustained across years — precisely the serialized visual storytelling that American comic books would codify as their native form two decades later.

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