1941.06.07 “Bringing Up Father” by George McManus & Zeke Zekley

1941.06.07 “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.

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

The news from the day before featured FDR’s worry, during a press conference, that many Americans were being duped by German propaganda into believing that Britain was on the verge of collapse and would soon be suing for peace.

Isolationism (neutrality) was still the rule of the day in the US. Lend-Lease had begun in March as a way around the protests against outright aid to Britain.

On this date, the first US Lend-Lease planes were flown to Maine and shoved over border into Canada, because the neutrality laws forbid landing in Canada.

And the German invasion of Russia was only a few weeks away.