ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370501

· May 1, 1937 (dated in strip: 5-1; copyright line reads King Features Syndicate, Inc.)

Bringing Up Father — buf370501
Three panels by George McManus track Jiggs's familiar predicament: Maggie scolds him for missing Lord Plymsey-Seless, Jiggs slips away from card-playing companions aboard what appears to be an ocean liner, and a furious Maggie — luggage open, rolling pin at the ready — confronts his late arrival. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his figures rendered with rounded silhouettes and expressive hands; the strip's recurring domestic warfare plays out entirely through dialogue balloons and pantomime gesture. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest newspaper dailies to sustain a recurring cast across decades, cementing conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, character continuity — that the nascent comic-book industry directly inherited.

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