ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370814

· August 14, 1937 (dated in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf370814
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This four-panel daily, dated 8-14 within the strip itself, turns on a classic McManus situation: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned reluctant millionaire, is warned by his wife Maggie and daughter to dress up and mind his table manners at Mrs. Ella Carte's dinner party — only to discover the hired butler is someone he knows. McManus's line work is elegant and economical: rounded figures, confident ink contours, and speech balloons that carry the entire comic load. Strips like this one were the direct raw material from which comic books were assembled and reprinted beginning in the early 1930s, making the newspaper page the true cradle of the medium.

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