ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390622

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390622
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication from 1913 until after his death, making Jiggs and Maggie two of the longest-lived characters in American comics. This three-panel daily strip — rendered largely in silhouette for the middle sequence, a McManus signature — follows Jiggs in conversation with an aristocratic English lord eager to engineer a match between his son and Jiggs's daughter Nora. The final panel pivots on Maggie's transparent scheming, the strip's engine for three decades. McManus's draftsmanship, with its Art Nouveau curves and meticulous rendering of interiors and dress, set a standard for the newspaper comic page that directly shaped the visual vocabulary — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — inherited wholesale by the comic book industry when reprint anthologies launched the format in the early 1930s.

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