ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf330521

· May 21, 1933

Bringing Up Father — buf330521
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* (1913–2000) follows Jiggs, a newly wealthy Irish-American laborer who craves corned beef and saloons, and his social-climbing wife Maggie, who hurls rolling pins and dishes at him with operatic regularity. This Sunday page — dated 5/21/33 in the upper corner — runs four tiers of densely packed panels: a new maid causes domestic chaos, a dinner guest (Judge O'Beer) gets knocked senseless, and a wild-card ex-wife crashes the finale. McManus drew with elegant Art Nouveau line work borrowed from his admiration of Aubrey Beardsley — decorative wallpaper, patterned dresses, fluid silhouettes. Launched in the *New York American*, the strip's recurring cast and sequential panel grammar helped establish the visual conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain