ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390826

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390826
Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running daily strip, as he moons over naming a grandchild 'Jiggie' — imagining the name in a saloon window — while Maggie, his fashion-conscious wife, simply bellows the name across the house, sending toys, a cat, and chaos flying in the final panel. McManus's draftsmanship is instantly recognizable: sinuous Art Nouveau linework, bold speed lines, and expressive lettering used as visual event. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its gags built on class anxiety and domestic warfare. Strips like this one — reproduced and collected — were among the direct commercial ancestors of the comic book format, proving that recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons could sustain mass audiences indefinitely.

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