ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf420809f

· August 9, 1942 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf420809f
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This Sunday page—copyrighted 1942 by King Features—follows the familiar war-era formula: Jiggs and Maggie trade nostalgic complaints about modern inconveniences while a chorus of neighbors one-ups them with hardship tales from the old days. McManus arranges his cast in ornate, wallpaper-patterned interiors, his line crisp and decorative, owing much to Art Nouveau. Speech balloons stack in tidy tiers; panel borders hold steady rhythm across three tiers. The strip's recurring class comedy—Irish immigrant Jiggs longing for corned beef while Maggie pursues society—helped define the domestic-bickering genre that shaped Sunday comics as a cultural institution, long before those pages were reprinted and stapled into the first comic books.

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