The American Comic Art
of George McManus

It is true that the national news newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today do not carry them, but most American daily and Sunday newspapers contain comics. Since the turn of the century when Americans first encountered newspaper comics, readers have delighted in the daily adventures of their favorite characters.

Comics are basically of two types: strips and panels. As the name implies, a strip is a series of panels in which a story or narrative is developed. Daily strips normally have three or four small panels; Sunday strips often run to six slightly larger panels. The multi-panel strip allows the cartoonist to develop both the characters and the humorous situation in which they are placed. Strips today are both smaller, in dimension, and shorter than they used to be. During the postcard age, Sunday strips often ran to 12 panels.

A panel is a single frame, such as in today’s popular comics The Far Side, Family Circus, Ziggy, or Heathcliff. Because the cartoonist cannot develop a comic story in a single picture, the comic art of the panel lies primarily in what is said, either by the characters or as a caption. Many panels depend on a joke, a pun, or an absurdly funny or clever remark.

Because postcards are small, they lend themselves to pane rather than strip humor. For example, although comic characters such as Garfield and Cathy appear on postcards, those cards do not reproduce or imitate the strips. More typically the character is portrayed in a humorous position to which is added a simple greeting line like “happy birth day,” “missing you,” “why don’t you write?” The traditional strip art, where the humor is developed through a story or situation, is rarely shown on a postcard. The two most significant modern comic narrative strips, Doonesbury and Bloom County are not, to my knowledge, represented on any postcard.

Panel art does however reproduce nicely on postcards. Panel comics by cartoonists such as Ken Brown or Gary Larson (The Far Side) are well represented on postcards, although the types of humor they represent do not appeal to everyone.

Perhaps because of this essential difference between strip and panel art, the great tradition of American comic art is not represented as thoroughly on postcards as we might imagine. The great comic strip characters are confine to single panels, limiting their comic potential. So even though classic American comic strip characters are reproduced on postcards — such as those produced as Sunday supplements for the Hearst newspapers — the cards are rarely as funny (or as complex) as the strips from which the characters were taken.

Still, the American comic art tradition is a rich and fascinating one and one that reveals a unique set of American concerns and values. One of the comic artists was George McManus who created Bringing Up Father, which is one of the great narrative strips that dominated the “funnies” for nearly three generations.

His Life
George McManus, the son of Irish immigrants George and Katherine Kenrick McManus, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1882, ‘83, or ‘84 (he claimed that no family records survived to date his birth). His father managed the Grand Opera House in St. Louis. George’s newspaper career began while he was still in high school when he was hired as an errand boy in the art department of the St. Louis Republic.

Newspapers at the turn of the century relied on artists’ sketches rather than photographs and McManus quickly established his artistic skills. He worked as well as a fashion illustrator for the newspaper, an interest that survived in his well-dressed comic strip women. His first strip, done in 1900, was Alma and Oliver, an effort that McManus later denounced.

Thanks to a $3,000 payoff at the races in 1904, McManus was able to travel to New York City to look for work. He was hired by the art department of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World where he worked as both a news illustrator and a cartoon artist. He produced several short-lived strips including Panhandle Pete, Snoozer, The Merry Marcelene, Ready Money Ladies, Spare Ribs and Gravy, and Let George Do It. His first cartoon success was The Newlyweds and Their Baby — the baby being, of course, Snookums.

In 1912 William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York American and the King Feature Syndicate, hired McManus away from Pulitzer’s paper. For his new employer, McManus created his most famous and successful strip, Bringing Up Father. Two other McManus strips appeared in the Sunday comics, Rosie’s Beau and its successor Snookums, featuring the exploits of America’s most popular baby.