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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father

· Sunday page, November 4, 1923

Bringing Up Father
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Jiggs and Maggie — nouveaux-riche Irish immigrants — as a deputy sheriff repossesses their house, forcing the family to haul belongings by car to a rural shack. McManus parcels the story across eleven panels, deploying speech balloons, sequential action, and a recurring cast with shorthand visual personalities: Maggie imperious and bonneted, Jiggs round and resigned. The strip's fluid Art Nouveau linework — McManus trained on decorative illustration — distinguishes it from rougher contemporaries. Sunday pages like this one, printed in color rotogravure, are the direct ancestors of the comic book format publishers began packaging just a decade later.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain