ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, March 15, 1914

· Sunday, March 15, 1914

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, March 15, 1914
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs here across the top of the Omaha Sunday Bee's back page in a single tier of eight panels. The strip's central joke is social mobility in reverse: Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American, craves corned beef and low company while his wife Maggie schemes to crash high society. In these panels Jiggs encounters a street tout — likely angling for a tip or a loan — and the gag turns on Jiggs's hapless generosity undercutting Maggie's ambitions. McManus's line is fluid and decorative, his figures wearing exaggerated fashion-plate silhouettes. Launched by King Features in 1913, the strip ran internationally for decades, its speech-balloon rhythm and recurring-character formula directly shaping the grammar every comic book would later inherit.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain