Then he started cranking up other features for the daily pages. When Hearst recruited the 28-year-old cartoonist in 1912, McManus brought The Newlyweds with him as a Sunday page and retitled it Their Only Child. Louis and then, especially, at the World in New York, McManus had created several comic strips-among them, Nipsy the Newsboy in Funny Fairyland (in imitation of McCay's Nemo) and The Newlyweds, to name a couple. Beginning at the Republic in his native St. Their origin, in fact, reveals something about the nature of newspaper cartooning in the early decades of the century. And it ran continuously after that, seven days a week, until May 28, 2000, when, at the age of 87, it was at last discontinued (except for some overseas distribution of reprints).īut Maggie and Jiggs did not burst upon the comics page fully formed in January 1913.
It ran only daily for the next five years (albeit not every day at first), and then on April 14, 1918, it began appearing in Sunday format, too. The first strip to bear the title Bringing Up Father appeared on January 2, 1913, a Thursday. And only The Katzenjammer Kids (which began December 12, 1897) and Gasoline Alley (November 24, 1918) can claim comparable longevity-112 years for the Katzies, 91 for the Alley both still running. None of us ever called it by its proper name: we called it "Jiggs" (after its male protagonist) or "Maggie and Jiggs" (including his wife). One of the most enduring of these strips was George McManus' masterpiece, Bringing Up Father. They succeeded because the predicament was so fundamental to the human condition and because the attitude towards it that was displayed in the strip was so absolutely refreshing. Such strips were continuous replays of some aspect of the human predicament. The Katzenjammer Kids with its endless parade of juvenile pranks comes immediately to mind as do others of its turn-of-the-century contemporaries- Foxy Grandpa about a sly oldster turning the tables on youngsters and Her Name Was Maud about a stubborn mule that outwits the humans around her. And the themes often proved marvelously adaptable, susceptible of countless mutations. We'd call them "one joke" strips in the more sophisticated years in the last decades of the twentieth century, but at the century's beginning, such single-minded thematic choruses, repeated day after day, were awaited eagerly by avid readers. Their humor resided in little more than a single situation, presented time and time again, each presentation a slight variation of the first, and basic, situation. Features Bringing Up Father and the Rest of the Comic PageĮarly comic strips were frequently single-theme enterprises.
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