From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf371130
· November 30, 1937

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily shows Jiggs scheming to talk Fifi the dog out of an Alaska trip by warning her of kennels and cold, only for Maggie to announce she has simply changed her mind — prompting Jiggs's deadpan aside that the dog has never been any use around the house anyway. McManus drew in a fluid Art Nouveau line, his women elegantly coiffed, his interiors opulently detailed. Strips like this one — self-contained gag units with recurring characters and speech balloons — were the structural DNA from which the comic book, assembled from reprinted newspaper pages beginning in the early 1930s, directly descended.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain