From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf390729
· Daily strip, c. 1930 (copyright date visible in image)

Six panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic exchange: their son and daughter have both married into nobility, leaving the house suddenly quiet. Maggie glows; Jiggs frets aloud whether their daughter will truly be happy in England with Lord Worthnotten — then dissolves into tears, prompting Maggie's exasperated final retort. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, deploying elegantly curved Art Nouveau linework against broad slapstick. The strip's recurring premise — Irish-immigrant nouveau-riche couple navigating high society — made it one of the most widely syndicated comics of the early twentieth century. Such daily strips, alongside Sunday pages, established the visual grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — that directly seeded the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain