ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370101

· Attributed to January 1, 1937 (per catalog reference)

Bringing Up Father — buf370101
Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs and family through a cascade of reminiscences — cousin Willie's wart-removing tonic, an acid-eaten anvil at the blacksmith's shop, and sister Katie's neighborhood gossip network — each gag building on the last in a single unbroken monologue of Irish-American domestic absurdity. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in newspaper history. McManus's art is immediately recognizable: bold ink outlines, decorative wallpaper-pattern costumes on Maggie, and expressive rubber-limbed figures. The daily newspaper strip — not the Sunday page — was the true cradle of the comic book format: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons, and cliffhanger continuity all developed here before they migrated to the pamphlet form of the 1930s.

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