1944.08.23 “Bringing Up Father” by George McManus

1944.08.23 “Bringing Up Father”
by George McManus (1884-1954) and Zeke Zekley (1915-2005)
23.25 x 5.75 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

In 1904, young George McManus was hired by Pulitzer’s New York World as a cartoonist. While he was there he created such strips as The Newlyweds, which comics historians consider the first family comic strip. In 1912, William Randolph Hearst hired McManus away to start a comic strip about a guy called Jiggs, a lower class man who came into a lot of money. With their new wealth, Maggie, Jiggs’ wife, wanted to enter the upper crust of society but Jiggs just wanted to hang out with his old friends at the local bar playing cards and pool and eat his simple favorite foods. This is the classic strip Bringing Up Father.

McManus had masterful line work with a strong deco feel to his designs. Over time, he developed the recurring motif of animating the background paintings in certain panels, and this is generally delightful.

Slang is generally considered a universal constant and an intrinsic feature of language. The enormous growth of broadcast media (movies, radio) in the 1930s and 1940s brought American slang to a wider audience than in previous eras. These two strips I have from August 23-24 highlight the usual generational divide that characterizes slang, as used by youth to set cultural identity. With each generation, although much of the usage dies out, a set words will also always persist and become part of the mainstream, common vernacular.

The whimsy in the funny papers often sits in sharp contrast to the news of the day.

The liberation of Paris began on August 19, 1944 and ended with the surrender of the German garrison in the French capital on August 25, 1944.