Argumento
Jiggs Is Back provides a wonderful window to this classic strip, which in turn offers a glorious view of a bygone era. The prefatory essay by Bill Blackbeard -- the dean of comic strip scholarship in America -- is both an informative history of the strip as well as a paean to McManus's artistry.
George McManus was he-of-the-steady-hand. No one drew a cleaner line. He influenced, and continues to influence, comics artists in America -- he was a formative influence on Carl Barks -- and around the world -- compare Joost Swarte's artwork to McManus's some time.
Running as the lead strip in the Hearst syndicate Sunday supplements from 1918 until McManus's death in 1954, Bringing Up Father was one of the most widely read strips of its day, and embodied the American immigrant experience (while McManus specifically addresses the Irish-American experience, this experience has nevertheless been repeated in its broadest aspects by all immigrant groups, and this continues even into the present: the upward mobility; the assimilationist imperative; the conflicts in gender roles between the old world and new; etc.) in the era between the two world wars, albeit in an extreme and parodic manner -- but that's what comics are for! Featuring Jiggs, his wife Maggie, their daughter Nora and a supporting cast of misfits and oddballs, McManus's strip was graphically inventive, gorgeously drawn, and most of all hilariously funny. It was the embodiment of the domestic situation comedy before the era of television, but with a level of artistry that was the equivalent of Howard Hawks directing I Love Lucy on a weekly basis.