ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf400201

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate, c. 1940

Bringing Up Father — buf400201
Three panels follow Jiggs and companions on a chauffeured tour of St. Paul, Minnesota. A local guide steers the open car past the Ice Vanities, a ski slope, and Hopsen Maltz Brewery — the largest brewery in St. Paul, he announces proudly — while Jiggs, hoping to encounter someone he knows, bolts from the car in the final panel, shouted back at by name. McManus's crisp cross-hatching, elegantly dressed figures, and rhythmic speech-balloon patter defined the strip's tone since 1913. *Bringing Up Father* ran in over 750 papers at its peak, and Sunday pages like this one — sold as syndicated broadsheets before reprint anthologies existed — are the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the American comic book.

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