From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf370112
· Daily strip, January 12 (year uncertain, c. 1930s–40s based on copyright notation)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Irish immigrant Jiggs, a nouveau-riche everyman forever caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his longing for corned beef and old pals. These four panels unfold as a reminiscence: a Branigan family picnic buried under luggage, a father awaiting any excuse to throw a punch, a mounted fish skeleton eaten clean by a cat, and children scrambling rooftop to watch a pinochle brawl. McManus drew with elegant Art Nouveau line work — curvaceous furniture, hatched shadows, expressive silhouettes — refined daily across nearly five decades. Launched by King Features in 1913, the strip helped standardize the daily comic format: recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech text that directly fed the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain