ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370612

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate, June 12, 1937

Bringing Up Father — buf370612
Four panels follow the familiar domestic war between Jiggs and Maggie: she dispatches him to scold their son for buying burlesque tickets; he confronts the boy in high moral dudgeon — then, clocking the good seats, pockets the tickets himself. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: Art Nouveau flourishes on doorframes and furniture, figures rendered in confident brushwork with crisp spotted blacks. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its recurring cast and sequential panel storytelling exemplifying the daily newspaper strip format that directly seeded the comic book — reprints of such strips, bundled and sold, became the first American comic books in the early 1930s.

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