ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf391114

· 1938 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf391114
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran as both a daily strip and Sunday page from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived continuities in American comics. This three-panel daily shows Jiggs and a companion dining in a near-deserted restaurant; Jiggs wonders aloud why no one ever dies in this town — "because no one lives here." The third panel erupts into stampeding crowd chaos at the cry of "Dinner!" McManus draws in a fluid, art-nouveau-inflected line, with confident crosshatching and expressive crowd caricature. His consistent characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons were foundational conventions that syndicates exported worldwide and that early comic-book publishers directly reprinted to fill their first anthology formats.

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