REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
The strip called Jiggs & Maggie by most of its readers started January 12, 1913, and like many of its vintage, it was essentially a one-joke enterprise, part of a constellation of strips about various aspects of courtship and married life that George McManus (1882-1954) was producing.
In Bringing Up Father, Jiggs, an ordinary Irish labourer, has become very wealthy and has moved his family into posh surroundings, but Jiggs persists in his old habits. And in his uninhibited naturalness (of which his socially ambitious wife Maggie is ashamed), and consequent desire to escape (for however brief a time) from the pretensions of the social world into which his wealth has thrust him (and from his wife's relentless attempts to reform him), we have both the source of the strip's comedy and an evocation of the immigrant experience in America - the ascent out of old world poverty into the relative prosperity of the new world.
A tireless escape artist, Jiggs is victorious (and persistent) enough to suggest that people are always better off being themselves than pretending to be something else. McManus multiplied endless comedic variations on this theme, preserving the aura of early comic strips well into mid-century.
Drawing with a fine and delicate line, he embellished the strip with decorative rococo backgrounds and ornate props - the filigree of a city skyline, the graceful curlicues in the design of a stair-railing or in the pattern of Maggie's dress - and by the artful placement of solid blacks, including the stunning deployment of silhouettes.
Still in circulation, Bringing Up Father is the second-longest running strip in history.
FURTHER READING:
TCJ: Bringing Up Father & The Rest of The Comics Page by R.C. Harvey
Bringing Up Father at Wikipedia
The Library of American Comics
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