ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390329

· 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390329
Four horizontal panels follow Maggie as she tries to rouse her sleeping husband before company arrives, then phones her brother Danny — who, it turns out, has posted a Do Not Disturb sign and instructed his own household to block her call. George McManus's strip, launched in *The New York American* in 1913, ran for decades as a daily and Sunday feature syndicated worldwide. McManus drew in a confident, Art Nouveau-inflected line — decorative wallpaper, rounded figures, expressive silhouettes — while deploying the speech balloon and sequential panel with practiced economy. Strips like this one were the raw material that 1930s publishers began reprinting as pamphlets, directly producing the comic-book format still in use today.

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