ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — February 13, 1925

· Published February 13, 1925 · © 1925 International Feature Service, Inc.

Bringing Up Father — February 13, 1925
Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American patriarch, as he bribes his daughter with a hundred-dollar check to reconcile with her mother — then discovers both women are furious with *him*. George McManus draws with confident Art Nouveau curves: patterned wallpaper, exaggerated silhouettes, and expressive rubber-limbed figures whose body language carries as much comedy as the dialogue balloons. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades in syndication, reaching millions of readers daily. McManus refined the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic book publishers of the 1930s, who reprinted strips like this one almost verbatim as their inaugural product.

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