George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This Sunday page runs two distinct sequences: a top strip of domestic telephone comedy, and a sprawling lower page in which Maggie catalogues the family's working-class past — Mary Dugan, the town barber's stove, Cousin Bertha's honeymoon, Molly O'Gallon's powdered cheeks — while Jiggs tries to slip away to Dinty's saloon. McManus's draftsmanship is exceptionally clean: rounded figures in bold outline, flat decorative color, and crowd scenes managed with confident economy. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for decades and circulated in dozens of countries, its Sunday-page format directly anticipating the comic-book page grid that would crystallize by the late 1930s.
About this artifact
- Date
- King Features Syndicate, August 16 (year unconfirmed)
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.