ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf330205

· ca. 1933, King Features Syndicate

Bringing Up Father — buf330205
Two full Sunday pages from George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history (1913–2000). The top page follows Jiggs on a Japan-bound ocean voyage, his boss cheerful at dockside while Jiggs broods that his wife Maggie didn't come to see him off — classic domestic irony in four clean horizontal tiers. The lower page is a scrapbook conceit: Maggie and young Larry leaf through a family photo album, its snapshots rendered as period vignettes dated 1894–1911, tracing Jiggs and Maggie's courtship, neighbors, relatives, and a discreet note that brother Larry 'went to jail.' McManus's brushwork — fluid ink outlines, flat color, decorative period clothing — set a visual standard that shaped how successive cartoonists structured recurring characters, running gags, and the Sunday-page format that directly seeded the first comic books of the 1930s.

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