ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf400909

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate, c. 1940

Bringing Up Father — buf400909
Four panels aboard a ship: a sailor offers Jiggs corned beef and cabbage — his beloved working-class staple — and Jiggs, ecstatic, stashes the plate while he sneaks below for a fork. He returns to find a pelican has stolen his meal, crying *CAW!* McManus's brushwork is fluid and confident; his characters are defined by thick, elastic outlines and expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, making it one of the longest continuous strips in history. McManus refined the speech balloon and the multi-panel comedic beat into repeatable art — techniques that would migrate directly into the comic book format when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.

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