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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, September 7, 1913

· September 7, 1913

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, September 7, 1913
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs six panels across the top of this Sunday page: Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American bricklayer, squares off against his socially ambitious wife Maggie in a series of doorway confrontations and hat-snatching gags, the strip's reliable engine. McManus draws with clean outlines, elegant Art Nouveau furniture, and broad physical comedy — rolling pins implied if not shown. Launched in 1913, the strip would run until 2000. This page appeared the very year Hearst and Pulitzer's Sunday color supplements were teaching cartoonists how panels sequence time, how speech balloons carry voice, and how a recurring cast builds reader loyalty — structural discoveries that, compiled into newsstand pamphlets in the 1930s, produced the comic book as a distinct medium.

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