From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf370320
· March 20, 1937 (King Features Syndicate)

Four daily panels show Jiggs lamenting that his secretary couldn't secure coronation tickets — every reservation is gone. Walking home with a theatrical sad face, he dreads telling Maggie, who sits at a table wearing an extravagant hat. When he delivers the news, she pivots instantly: they'll charter a yacht instead. Her final "O-U-" trails off, implying a grand solution mid-sentence. McManus's art is clean and assured — thick outlines, minimal backgrounds indoors, lively street geometry outside. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913, making it one of the longest-running daily strips; its domestic-comedy format and firmly established recurring cast helped standardize the conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, consistent character design — that newspaper syndicates carried directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain