ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf420830f

· August 30, 1942 (Sunday page)

Bringing Up Father — buf420830f
George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, and by the 1940s it was one of the most widely reprinted Sunday pages on earth. This installment follows Jiggs — nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, lover of corned beef and saloon cronies — as his socially ambitious wife Maggie traps him indoors for an evening of lectures on refinement, while he sneaks out, enjoys himself at a crowded piano bar, and returns home to find her monologue still running. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: Art Nouveau–inflected interiors, crosshatched black-tie figures, and Maggie's imperious silhouette framed in doorways. The strip's panel-by-panel rhythm — setup, escalation, comic reversal, coda — codified storytelling conventions that early comic-book editors would inherit wholesale.

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