From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — October 28, 1925
· Daily strip, October 28, 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* began in 1913 and ran for decades, following nouveau-riche Jiggs, who longs for his old working-class haunts, and his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs slips on a wig before entering Dinty Moore's saloon, fearing Maggie will spot him. She passes without recognition — her own elaborate hat and dress making the disguise absurdly effective — and Jiggs pockets the wig, declaring it 'a life saver.' McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: cross-hatched brickwork, fluid figure silhouettes, and silent reaction panels that prove speech balloons need no words. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies — syndicated to hundreds of papers simultaneously — built the recurring characters, panel grammar, and sequential storytelling that directly seeded the comic-book format emerging in the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain