Bringing Up Father (ca. 1945, unpublished, partially inked)
by George McManus (1884-1954) and Zeke Zekley (1915-2005)
20 x 12.5 in., ink on heavy 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, which is counted as the longest running comic strip of the 20th Century (1913-2000) after The Katzenjammer Kids, 1897-2006. A few more that started after 1913 now have longer absolute running times, post-2000.
Zeke Zekley was George McManus' longtime assistant on 'Bringing Up Father'.
Zekley worked as a cartoonist in Detroit, before he came to Beverly Hills, California. Noticed by McManus' brother, Zekley was taken on as McManus' assistant in 1935. At first, he helped on the inking and the lettering on the strip. Zekley soon became a collaborator, doing pencil work as well as scriptwriting. During World War II, he was in the Army and drew cartoons for the military. Because he was stationed near McManus, he continued to work on Bringing Up Father throughout the WWII years.
Zeke was eventually drawing and even writing more of Jiggs and Maggie than McManus. And his mimicry of McManus’ manner was flawless: by the end of the 1930s, neither artist could tell with perfect confidence who had drawn what in the strip.
Between 1935 and 1954, Zekley made a major contribution to the strip in both writing and art. When McManus died in 1954, it wasn't Zekley who succeeded him, but King Features hired Vernon Greene. A snub to Zekley.
This unpublished draft of a strip was likely created sometime in the 1940s. As it is from the Zekley estate, the pencilwork and scripting is presumed to be Zekley, but you apparently never know. Perhaps this is the way the draft came from McManus and Zekley started to ink it. Or… vice versa.
