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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf371012

· © 1937, King Features Syndicate (daily strip, exact date unconfirmed)

Bringing Up Father — buf371012
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran as a King Features daily and Sunday strip from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived character strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the familiar domestic rhythm: Maggie complains that Jiggs's piano-tuner acquaintance has stopped practicing; Jiggs quietly hopes no replacement can be found; he savors the sudden quiet—then the final panel reveals the tuner has simply traded piano for a comically enormous brass instrument, blasting away outside. McManus drew in a sinuous Art Nouveau line, his interiors packed with confident crosshatching and exaggerated figure-work. Strips like this one—self-contained gag sequences with recurring characters and speech balloons—formed the direct template that 1930s anthology comic books reprinted and then imitated, establishing the page architecture still standard today.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain