ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf410712

· Published July 13, 1941

Bringing Up Father — buf410712
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish-American, perpetually dragged by his social-climbing wife Maggie into the rituals of high society. This Sunday page tracks a single escalating gag: Maggie forces Jiggs through a rapid-fire succession of outfit changes—brown suit, gray coat, striped shirt, dark-blue suit—to receive a visiting dignitary who turns out to be not a person but a hundred-dollar book purchase. McManus's draftsmanship is ornate and precise, with decorative borders, fluid figure work, and crisp speech balloons driving the comedy. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and shaped the visual language of sequential art—panel rhythm, recurring character archetypes, and domestic situation comedy—that daily newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books.

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