From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf390512
· c. 1930s–1940s (exact date unverified)

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and it ran in syndication for decades, reaching an estimated 500 million readers worldwide. This daily strip follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie — here seen waiting at a train platform, then navigating a crowd of complaining passengers who grouse about a crying child, railroad stock, and sleepless nights. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: elegantly inked figures, decorative crosshatching, and speech balloons nested tightly into crowd scenes. The strip exemplifies the syndicated daily format — three to four horizontal panels, punchy dialogue, a sight-gag payoff — that newspaper comics perfected between 1910 and 1940, directly supplying the page-layout grammar that early comic books would inherit wholesale.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain