ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370422

· George McManus, c. 1920s–1930s (exact date unverified)

Bringing Up Father — buf370422
Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, apparently hiding below deck on an ocean voyage while his wife and daughter fret above. The strip's comedy turns on class anxiety: daughter worries Jiggs will embarrass the family by missing the shipboard elite, then encounters Lord Philip Yurmugg, who cheerfully confirms meeting Jiggs — alongside Admiral Drinker. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his characters rendered with clean ink and expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and helped establish the recurring-cast daily strip as a durable commercial form — the same newspaper page ecosystem that would directly seed the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s.

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