ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370607

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate (date unconfirmed)

Bringing Up Father — buf370607
Four panels follow the domestic morning routine of Maggie and Jiggs: Maggie drags her reluctant husband from bed at nine o'clock, scolds him in the kitchen over eggs and the breakfast table, and the strip closes with Jiggs sprawled on the floor — the punchline delivered wordlessly. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant and assured, his figures rounded and expressive, backgrounds rendered with confident crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. These newspaper dailies — alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and McCay's *Little Nemo* — invented the recurring cast, the speech balloon, and the sequential panel grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale when publishers began reprinting strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.

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