ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf410810

· August 10, 1941 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf410810
Two Sunday pages from George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, running here dated 8·10 and signed with his looping monogram. The strip follows Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant nouveau-riche husband, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. The upper tier shows Jiggs maneuvering a walk with Rosie, his face reddening in caught-out close-ups; the lower sprawls into an extended family musicale joke, relatives catalogued in overlapping speech balloons — a caged singer, a jailed trombone player, a nephew blowing a tuba to explosive effect. McManus launched the strip in 1913, perfecting Art Nouveau-inflected linework, elegant dress details, and balloon-dense crowd panels that directly shaped how Sunday pages trained American readers to follow sequential visual narrative.

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