ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390222

· Daily strip, 1939 (copyright date visible in image)

Bringing Up Father — buf390222
Four panels follow the dotted-robe-clad Jiggs, perpetual social climber turned deadbeat brother-in-law target, scrambling out of the house before a money-hungry relative can corner him. His wife Maggie relays the ambush plan; Jiggs plots his escape; the final panel shows him already in the bath, a question mark balloon floating above the still-snoring visitor. George McManus's line work is fluid Art Deco domesticity — rounded figures, patterned fabrics, ornate interiors sketched with practiced economy. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the longest-running and most widely distributed strips of the century, its recurring characters and sequential panel logic helping establish the visual grammar that daily newspaper comics — the direct precursor to the comic book format — handed to the emerging medium.

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