From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf370219
· 1937, King Features Syndicate (copyright visible in strip)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs four panels here in the classic daily-strip format. A narrator figure in silhouette opens by reminiscing about 'Danny Dugan' and his habit of peering into peep-show machines; successive panels recall a balloon ascension interrupted by a neck boil, a policeman uncle who vanished whenever he spotted trouble, and children splashing in gutter water as a spring wagon passed. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: bold ink outlines, decorative Art Nouveau interior details, and expressive crowd figures. Launched in 1913, the strip was among the first recurring newspaper comics to build its humor entirely on a stable cast — Jiggs, Maggie, their social-climbing world — helping establish the grammar of sequential panels and character continuity that Sunday pages exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain