ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390828

· c. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390828
Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic negotiation: a mother-in-law announces a sailing trip to England; Maggie replies with breezy enthusiasm; a round, bald son-in-law named Lord Worthnotten delivers the invitation in person; and Maggie, now on the telephone, rattles off an itinerary — Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Aunt Sophie in Trenton — that has clearly ballooned far beyond the original plan, leaving Jiggs sputtering in the final panel. George McManus's brushwork is fluid and confident, his figures built on exaggerated curves. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making McManus one of the architects of the daily comic strip's visual language — the ruled panel grid, integrated speech balloons, and recurring ensemble cast that newspaper syndicates standardized and comic books later inherited wholesale.

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