From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf371208
· December 8, 1917

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own earthier pleasures. In this three-panel daily, Maggie demands his attention; he deflects with a deadpan insult about her appearance; she erupts with a counter-insult; and the final panel finds him launched through the air amid a starburst of impact lines — McManus's signature shorthand for a well-aimed thrown object. McManus drew with a jeweler's precision: crosshatched suits, exaggerated silhouettes, immaculate speech balloons integrated into clean compositions. Launched in 1913 and syndicated by King Features, the strip ran for decades and was among the first American comics adapted into film and animation, demonstrating how the newspaper daily strip was itself the prototype form from which all sequential-art storytelling descended.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain