From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf390516
· ca. 1930s–1940s (exact date unverified)

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and it ran for decades as one of the most widely syndicated strips in American newspaper history. This daily strip follows the familiar household triangle: the rotund, good-natured Jiggs; his socially ambitious wife Maggie; and here, a baby in a high chair. Four panels track a simple gag — a man baby-talks the infant, Maggie scolds him for risking tears, then the baby punctuates the lecture with a loud "WOW!" McManus's line work is assured and economical, his figures rendered in bold black-and-white with strong silhouettes. Newspaper dailies like this one — deploying sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring cast — established the visual grammar that direct-to-print comic books would inherit wholesale after 1933.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain