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Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, February 8, 1914

· February 8, 1914

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, February 8, 1914
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs across the top of this Sunday page in a horizontal tier of nine panels. Jiggs — squat, cigar-chomping, newly rich Irish immigrant — arrives at a grand mansion seeking a guide position, only to be hired as a son-in-law. His wife Maggie, imperious and social-climbing, hovers throughout. McManus draws in a clean art-nouveau line, his figures rounded and expressive, the architecture ornate. Launched in 1913 for King Features, the strip was among the first to fix a recurring cast whose domestic tensions carried week to week — a narrative continuity that, compiled into reprint pamphlets sold at newsstands, directly prefigured the comic book format. The Sunday newspaper page was the laboratory where panels, speech balloons, and sequential visual grammar were standardized for mass print.

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