ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, May 24, 1914

· May 24, 1914

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Sunday Bee, May 24, 1914
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs here across six panels: Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie navigate a grand columned building — likely a museum or mansion — as Jiggs eyes an escape and Maggie presses forward in her finery. McManus draws with fluid Art Nouveau line work, ornate architectural backgrounds, and expressive physical comedy; speech balloons anchor the timing. Launched in 1913 for the Hearst syndicate, the strip joined *Mutt and Jeff*, *Krazy Kat*, and *Little Nemo* in forging the Sunday broadsheet page into sequential visual storytelling — the direct ancestor of the comic book. These syndicated Sunday pages, reproduced across hundreds of papers simultaneously, established recurring characters, panel grids, and the grammar of comics as a mass medium.

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