Customer Reviews

Forever Nuts Presents Bringing Up Father

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One of the more surprising things about Bringing Up Father is that it took only about two months of experimentation before George McManus sorted out the details for his premise: the battle between Maggie's social climbing instincts and her husband's (we never do learn what his given name is; all we know is that he's *Mr* Jiggs) desire to spend time drinking beer with his pre-wealth buddies. It seems like a limited proposition, but McManus is always up to the creative challenge and keeps us laughing at each cross-cultural outrage. His artistry captures the female fashions of the period in incredible detail, while his awareness of the then-contemporary culture leaves us with eye-opening insight into what life in the 'teens was like. My father, who was born in 1894, used to tell me about fetching a bucket of beer from the local saloon for his father. It sounded preposterous to me when I was a kid. Yet, here is Jiggs fetching his own buckets of beer, and even pressing other exceptionally unlikely vessels into service to carry his precious beer! I'm looking forward to a future volume to find out how Jiggs managed to survive prohibition!
The images are very vivid, and appear to come from first-rate sources -- amazing for material this old. The size of the panels varies from strip to strip, and this may reflect either size of the best extant material or perhaps the fact that McManus himself varied the size depending on his mood. In either case, the two-strips-per-page format allows all of the strips to be generously large and quite appropriate for study of detail in the pictures (and, yes, there are many details worth studying!). The vertical size has not been altered (i.e. the bottom hasn't been cut off, as was done in many newspapers). Where necessary, annotations are available for those strips which refer to now-obsolete or obscure cultural standards. All in all this is a great little book for both entertainment and information.

As a long time fan of newspaper strip reprints I had always hope to see George McManus's "Bringing Up Father" see the light of day. I have always found McManus's drawing style beautiful and unique but have not, until now, seen more than a handful of strips published at a time. NBM's third book in the Forever Nuts Series turns out to be the best so far! It appears to be complete (it is explained that this strip was not published five days a week at this time) for the time period covered; the first two years of complete dailies (1913-1914) and it is also the best chronicled and best documented of the three books (the first two are "Mutt & Jeff, The Early Years" and "Happy Hooligan"). Also, this is the first of the three to feature an annotation section with interesting information on many of the individual strips and explanations regarding jargon, fads and historical events unique to this time period. The humor is somewhat slapstick but very satisfying. A must for any collector of newspaper strip reprint books, let's hope to see more Maggie & Jiggs reprints!

I have always been a big fan of the early Maggie and Jiggs series. This collection is like icing on the cake.