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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf430214f

· February 14, 1943 (dated in strip lower left)

Bringing Up Father — buf430214f
George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, running it until his death in 1954 — one of the longest continuous strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Twelve panels move from a disastrous dinner at the Ribenbone Café — soup billed as a national debt, no money to pay — to a frantic phone chain about a missing pocketbook, closing on Maggie furiously scratching nail polish while Jiggs pleads for butter. McManus's art is distinctive: lush Art Nouveau ornament, impeccably dressed figures, and expressive rubber-faced comedy — visual sophistication that helped establish the Sunday page as a legitimate graphic medium.

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