From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf370127
· January 27, likely 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran as a daily strip from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived continuities in American newspaper comics. This four-panel daily follows Maggie's reminiscing voice — recalling Aunt Tillie's hand-knitted gifts, Martha's music-box courtship trap, and Uncle Slats's restaurant vigil — rendered in McManus's signature Art Nouveau linework: curlicued furniture, cross-hatched plaid jackets, and characters rendered with balletic exaggeration. The recurring immigrant-family premise (Irish-American Jiggs striking it rich, Maggie desperate for respectability) gave newspaper readers a reliable domestic comedy across four decades. McManus's refined draftsmanship, inherited partly from Winsor McCay, helped establish the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that daily strips would export directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain