ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390413

· c. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390413
Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as his daughter reports that Sir Von Platter waits at home. Jiggs grumbles at the office that watching Von Platter makes him feel lucky by comparison; he resolves to go home, frets that Von Platter—like his wife Maggie's brother—is 'the worst pest'; then finds both men snoring identically on the furniture. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades as one of American syndication's longest dailies. McManus's elegantly Art Nouveau linework, his precise use of speech balloons stacked for comic timing, and his recurring domestic cast were direct models for the comic-book page format that emerged through the 1930s, when reprinted newspaper strips filled the first true comic books.

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