Bringing Up Father — buf370325

Bringing Up Father · George McManus · King Features Syndicate, daily strip, March 25, 1937 Four ink-washed panels follow Jiggs, the cigar-chewing Irish-American social climber, as he declares he will travel to Europe for a coronation — almost certainly the May 1937 crowning of George VI. His wife Maggie, elegantly drawn with McManus's characteristic Art Nouveau curves and piled-up hair, swiftly hijacks the plan: she phones a neighbor to announce that *she* is going while her husband is decidedly not. Jiggs ends the strip bewildered. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. Its clean contour lines, decorative interiors, and expressive pantomime helped establish the visual conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — that newspaper comic pages passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.