ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf410920f

· © 1941, King Features Syndicate

Bringing Up Father — buf410920f
George McManus's long-running Sunday page follows Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American bricklayer, and a relentless real-estate salesman pitching a country manor. Eight panels move from the agent's flowery sales pitch — palatial veranda, velvet roads, silver mountain peaks — through Jiggs's deadpan inspection of what turns out to be a tumbledown wreck listing off its foundation. McManus draws in crisp ink line with Art Deco architectural flourishes and a gifted eye for crowd choreography. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first strips syndicated globally, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar directly shaping the anthology reprint pamphlets that became comic books by 1938.

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