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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — 22 October 1925

· Daily strip, 22 October 1925

Bringing Up Father — 22 October 1925
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a Irish-immigrant nouveau-riche husband perpetually at war with social pretension and his domineering wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs grumbles about wearing a wig until his own hair grows, the wig-maker having instructed him to wash it weekly and dry it on the window sill — where, of course, it promptly goes missing. His curly-haired daughter asks the obvious question; Jiggs's mild panic closes the strip. McManus's clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and brickwork cross-hatching exemplify the draftsmanship that made his strip, launched in 1913, one of the most widely syndicated in the world and a direct ancestor of the comic-book page format.

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