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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370316

· Daily strip, March 16, 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf370316
Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a classic reversal gag: Jiggs, cane in hand, regrets he cannot accompany Maggie to London for a coronation; Maggie smugly announces she is going anyway; then Jiggs abruptly changes his mind once he learns Lord Monoclepuss — evidently a social rival — will not attend. George McManus's linework is elegant and economical, his characters defined by silhouette and thick ink outlines softened with Ben-Day-style shading. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first strips to build a long-running cast with consistent personalities, helping establish the recurring-character model that syndicates would export worldwide and that early comic-book reprint anthologies — the direct precursors of the original comic book — would package for newsstands through the 1930s.

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