ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370122

· January 22 (year uncertain; copyright line reads 1917, King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf370122
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs three panels here, each a tight domestic vignette: an overstuffed family commandeering a horse-drawn streetcar in panel one; a woman defending borrowed household goods—a washtub, a stove—in panel two; and a moonlit ladder-elopement gag in panel three, capped by a punchline about a father who spent a week on the rungs. McManus's draftsmanship is confident and decorative, with fluid brushwork, patterned costumes, and expressive ballooning that keeps overlapping dialogue readable. Launched in 1913, the strip's upwardly mobile Irish-immigrant couple Jiggs and Maggie became among the first globally syndicated comic characters, helping standardize the daily strip's sequential panel grammar that would directly scaffold the comic-book format a generation later.

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