ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, April 26, 1914

· Published April 26, 1914

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, April 26, 1914
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — syndicated by the International News Service — runs here across the top of the Sunday page in a wide horizontal tier of six panels. The strip follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish immigrant, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. In this installment Jiggs schemes to sneak out for billiards and beer while Maggie pushes him toward high-society refinement; the gag turns on his failed escape. McManus's line is fluid and elegant — Art Nouveau curves animate the domestic interiors, and speech balloons carry the entire comedic rhythm. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to build a globally recurring cast and use consistent visual grammar — panel gutters, integrated lettering, sequential staging — tools Sunday pages were then perfecting and that comic books would directly inherit.

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