ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390912

· c. 1938 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390912
Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's long-running immigrant-made-good couple. Here Maggie insists on phoning their son before a trip; Jiggs deflects by joking about Hollywood jewel thefts; then, reached by telephone, he endures Maggie's breathless travelogue about movie-star homes and a celebrity sighting she trails off naming. McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship — crisp crosshatching, elegantly dressed figures, ornate interior furnishings — is recognizable across the strip's run from 1913 to 1954. *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest American strips syndicated internationally, and its format — recurring characters, sequential gag panels, integrated speech balloons — directly shaped the page architecture that comic-book editors codified in the late 1930s.

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