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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — October 21, 1925

· Daily strip, October 21, 1925

Bringing Up Father — October 21, 1925
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish-American, and his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs spots a crowd of women fawning over an actor's 'gorgeous head of hair' at a stage door. Glancing at his own thinning scalp, he ducks into a wig maker's shop and emerges wearing a toupee for a proud stroll up the avenue — only to look absurd. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant and economical: rounded figures, crisp crosshatching, and speech balloons woven naturally into the composition. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and helped codify the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, expressive balloon lettering — that newspaper comic pages passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.

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