ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf391231

· December 31, 1939 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf391231
George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1939 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This Sunday page follows Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant parvenu who struck it rich but still sneaks off to Dinty Moore's for corned beef — and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Two narrative threads interweave: a comic-strip boss-and-secretary phone farce in the dailies-style top tier, then a full panoramic splash of Broadway at night, its electric signs blazing, as Jiggs tours a country visitor past the Hudson River and down into the subway. McManus's draftsmanship is lavish — the Broadway panel rivals a WPA mural — while his speech balloons and panel gutters codify conventions that comic books, born from reprinted Sunday pages like this one, would inherit wholesale.

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