From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf371106
· Daily strip, © 1917, King Features Syndicate

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own taste for corned beef and old pals. This six-panel daily shows the couple hosting visitors; Maggie praises the household's newfound quiet and calm while Jiggs quietly needles her, until she erupts in the final panel — mallet raised, stars flying — sending him scrambling. McManus drew with elegant Art Nouveau line work: sinuous women in elaborate hats, expressive slapstick bodies, and tightly lettered speech balloons that carry the comedy's entire rhythm. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and circulated globally, its panel-by-panel visual grammar directly feeding the anthology reprint comics that became the modern comic book format.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain