ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf400708

· ca. July 8, 1940 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf400708
Four panels follow Jiggs home for a nap, only to find his sofa and cigar-stand gone — sold off by his wife Maggie's brother while he was out. George McManus draws his signature Art Deco interiors in clean ink line, the butler delivering bad news with theatrical gestures while Jiggs's face cycles from anticipation to horror. The strip's final punchline — check whether the furnace is still there — lands with McManus's characteristic dry deflation. Running since 1913, *Bringing Up Father* helped establish the recurring-character daily strip as a commercial institution, and its Sunday pages, reprinted in early comic book collections like the Cupples & Leon volumes, are direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.

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