ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf370920

· September 20, 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf370920
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until after his death, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This daily shows Jiggs clutching his aching foot and announcing he has the gout; wife Maggie lectures him across four panels — nights out, smoking, drinking — while Jiggs offers feeble rejoinders. The final panel delivers the punchline: the doctor sent to treat him has the gout himself. McManus drew with a confident Art Nouveau line, filling backgrounds with wallpaper patterns and decorative frames that give even a cramped four-panel daily visual richness. The strip's recurring domestic-comedy structure — suffering husband, imperious wife, sardonic payoff — was foundational vocabulary for the gag-strip form that comic books would later inherit wholesale.

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