ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390323

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390323
Three panels follow Jiggs and a companion fishing from a rowboat. Panel one: a large decoy fish floats nearby while a figure sleeps, snoring — Maggie's brother, dismissed as too lazy to bait his own hook. Panel two: Jiggs slumps in the boat, fishless after five hours. Panel three: the punchline reverses everything — a vast netted haul of fish towers above them, caught by the very man they mocked. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, his crisp ligne-claire linework and immaculate lettering setting a benchmark for daily strip draftsmanship. The strip's recurring cast — Irish immigrant Jiggs forever caught between working-class roots and his wife Maggie's social ambitions — ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, and those syndicated daily pages, collected and reprinted, fed directly into the earliest comic book format.

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