From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf310111
· January 11, 1931

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This Sunday page from January 11, 1931 follows Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic radio war: the maid dusts to music, Maggie wants classical programming, Jiggs wants the boxing match, and their daughter is lost in romantic songs — four separate gags resolving in chaotic simultaneity across twelve panels. McManus's draftsmanship is exceptionally refined: Art Nouveau-inflected furniture, elegant crosshatching, and fluid figure work distinguish his pages from rougher contemporaries. Sunday newspaper pages like this one — distributed as syndicated broadsheets before comic books existed as a format — established the recurring-character strip, the multi-panel sequence, and the speech balloon as the foundational grammar of American sequential art.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain