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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-02

· July 2, 1925

Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-02
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* (syndicated from 1913) follows the domestic war between nouveau-riche Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Maggie harangues Jiggs into visiting his office at noon; arriving, he finds his secretary absent and delivers a straight-faced rebuke — only for the secretary's retort to land the final punch. McManus draws in a clean art-nouveau line, his figures round and expressive, office furniture sketched in bold silhouette. By 1925 the strip ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, demonstrating how the syndicated daily strip — with its locked-in characters, speech balloons, and sequential panels — was quietly assembling the visual grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale a decade later.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain