From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf370202
· c. 1937, King Features Syndicate

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie and Jiggs through a torrent of reminiscence: a neighbor woman's apron-for-the-door habit, old Dinny McGatty barred from the parlor until the piano moved, and the car-driving Mrs. Annie Speedledo whose backfire set the neighborhood panicking. McManus's line is fluent and rounded, the figures broad and expressive, speech balloons packed with working-class vernacular. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making George McManus one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists in the world. The strip's daily and Sunday installments — reproduced, trimmed, and stapled — were among the direct raw material from which the first comic books were assembled in the early 1930s, proving that the newspaper page, not the magazine, invented the form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain