ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf400421

· April 21, 1940 (daily strip dated 4-21; Sunday page undated)

Bringing Up Father — buf400421
Two sequences run here: a daily strip in which Jiggs scrambles to locate his wife Maggie's written address before a dinner engagement, and a full Sunday page built around a single elaborate gag — a fashionable Chicago dinner party where every guest pleads a dietary excuse (a pulled tooth, a diet, a cold, indigestion) while Jiggs, in the final tier, happily demands beans, buns, and a slab of beef. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, and his fluid Art Nouveau linework — sinuous curtains, tiled floors, chandelier close-ups — set a visual standard for the newspaper page. The strip's recurring class-reversal premise (Irish immigrant Jiggs versus socially ambitious Maggie) gave readers a dependable weekly rhythm that syndicates later packaged as comic books, making Sunday pages the direct ancestor of the bound format.

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