ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — August 21, 1925

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate, 1925

Bringing Up Father — August 21, 1925
Four panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish immigrant, after his wife Maggie discovers a newspaper item falsely reporting his death. Jiggs, worried about a date with George Porter, phones his friend before Maggie can act — only to be asked, deadpan, *"Where are you phonin' from?"* McManus draws with crisp art-nouveau line work: decorative wallpaper, elegantly tapered furniture, expressive rubber-faced characters. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran over forty years in hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the first cartoonists to demonstrate that a recurring cast in daily strip format could sustain a global readership — proving the newspaper comic page the direct ancestor of the comic book's character-driven serial storytelling.

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