ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390327

· c. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390327
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — signed McManus in the final panel — follows the eternal domestic war between nouveau-riche Maggie and her hen-pecked husband Jiggs. Here, across four panels, Maggie orders a young girl to play quietly, Jiggs fantasizes about faking marriage to escape, Maggie threatens to discipline the crying baby, and Jiggs concludes the infant could sleep through anything — before being warned he must rock the baby himself. McManus's brushwork is fluid and assured: rounded figures, decorative wallpaper, economical backgrounds. Launched in 1913 by King Features Syndicate, the strip ran for decades and helped standardize the daily comic strip's visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that directly fed the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s.

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