ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390302

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390302
Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the hen-pecked social climber in his checked vest and top hat, through a telephone farce: spotting a sleeping visitor he wants to shake down for cash, he retreats to his office to phone home, learns from his daughter that two brothers brawled over the sofa, then recoils — 'HUH—' — on discovering one is already asleep in his bed. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, his Art Nouveau-inflected linework and stagey compositions influencing a generation of cartoonists. The strip's recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons exemplify the newspaper daily format that directly supplied the page layouts and storytelling conventions early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and later imitated.

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