ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390620

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390620
Three daily panels follow Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's blue-collar-Irish-immigrant-made-good couple, through a recurring gag structure: domestic misunderstanding escalates to comic reversal. Here a letter in Chinese script sends Jiggs to a laundry for translation; the punchline delivers a bundle of washing instead of a baby name. McManus's line is elegantly decorative — crosshatched collars, floral wallpaper, expressive silhouettes — rooted in Art Nouveau poster work. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, exemplifying the newspaper daily strip format whose panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring characters provided the direct structural template for the comic book form that emerged in the 1930s.

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