ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370629

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate, 1937 (dated 6·29 in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf370629
Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber familiar to readers since 1913, as he walks the family dog. A neighbor envies him the errand; Jiggs confesses his wife ordered it. In the final panel he has abandoned the dog in a box and slipped away. McManus's linework is elegant — derby hat, wing collar, spats rendered with confident brushwork — and the strip's recurring joke (Jiggs dodging domestic duty) runs without a word wasted. *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest daily strips to sustain fixed characters across years of continuity, helping establish the conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, consistent visual shorthand — that syndicates exported worldwide and that comic-book editors would inherit wholesale when anthology reprint titles launched in the early 1930s.

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