ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370401

· Daily strip, c. April 1, 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf370401
Four panels in McManus's clean, art-deco line work: Jiggs, the Irish-American parvenu, laments missing Dinty Moore's corned beef and cabbage while being pressed to attend a coronation abroad. A portly acquaintance announces the trip is financially impossible — then reveals his brother owns a café in London serving corned beef and cabbage. Jiggs, electrified, demands the line repeated; the final panel shows him eagerly angling for an introduction. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running daily strips in syndication history. Its refined crosshatching, elegant furniture, and fluid balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar — recurring cast, strip-length joke arc, expressive silhouette — that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.

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