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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — 29 August 1925

· George McManus, 1925

Bringing Up Father — 29 August 1925
Four panels follow Jiggs, the patterned-robe-clad father, fuming at midnight that his daughter's suitor won't leave. He calls her to the stairs, then asks whether her mother ever complained about men staying too late. The daughter's deadpan reply — 'Mother says men haven't changed a bit' — lands the gag squarely on Jiggs. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1925 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, making Jiggs and Maggie among the most recognized fictional figures on earth. The strip refined the daily four-panel rhythm and expressive speech-balloon lettering that newspaper comics had been developing since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s — the same visual grammar that, within a decade, would be reprinted as the first comic books.

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