1944.07.17 “Bringing Up Father”

1944.07.17 “Bringing Up Father”
by George McManus (1884-1954) and Zeke Zekley (1915-2005)
23.25 x 5.75 in., ink on paper

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 day before, July 16, 1944, Hitler flew to the Wolf’s Lair for what would be his last trip to the mountain retreat.

On the 17th, the Port Chicago disaster occurred when a munitions explosion on a cargo vessel in Port Chicago, California. Munitions detonated while being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Most of the dead and injured were enlisted African-American sailors. Located just inside a main tributary of the San Francisco East Bay, the town was closed down in 1969.

And on July 20, the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg took place, as told on the movie, The Valkyrie. On the same day, FDR addressed the Democratic National Convention after accepting the nomination for an unprecedented fourth term as president.