ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, June 14, 1914

· Published June 14, 1914

Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, June 14, 1914
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs here across a full Sunday broadsheet tier, its eight or so panels tracking the eternal class-war comedy of Jiggs—round, cigar-chomping Irish immigrant made suddenly rich—and his socially ambitious wife Maggie, rolling-pin ever ready. The strip's visual signature is already fully formed: elegant Art Nouveau linework, overcrowded parlors signaling new money, and Jiggs's bowler hat as shorthand for his refusal to rise above corned beef and pool halls. Launched in 1913 for King Features, *Bringing Up Father* joined Richard Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Rudolph Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids* as the scaffolding on which newspaper comics built their grammar—recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons anchoring dialogue to speaker—conventions that would migrate wholesale into the comic book format two decades later.

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