ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — July 23, 1925

· George McManus, 1925

Bringing Up Father — July 23, 1925
Four panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American laborer turned millionaire, as he tries to conduct business at his office. Each panel piles on a new domestic interruption: his daughter wants letters dictated, then bookkeeping done, then crossword puzzles solved — and finally the office boy arrives to haul Jiggs's chair home for the family library. McManus's linework is clean and confident, figures rendered with rounded solidity against spare backgrounds. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first newspaper strips to sustain a continuous cast across daily and Sunday pages — the serialized format, recurring characters, and sequential panel grammar that strips like this one codified directly seeded the comic book form that would emerge in the 1930s.

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