ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf371230

· Daily strip, December 30, 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf371230
Four panels in McManus's elegant Art Deco line: Maggie berates Jiggs for staying late at the office; Jiggs phones his own home pretending to be "Von Platter's secretary," announcing Mr. Jiggs won't be working so hard; Maggie, suspicious, interrogates the caller; and the final panel finds Jiggs outside in hat and spats, umbrella crooked over his arm, muttering that his boss has forgotten his name but might know him by sight. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. Its crosshatched interiors, decorative wallpaper, and confident balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar—panel rhythm, reaction beats, recurring domestic archetypes—that early comic-book editors would directly inherit when anthology formats began reprinting newspaper dailies in the mid-1930s.

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