ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390731

· c. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390731
Four panels track a domestic dispute: a curly-haired woman scolds her husband for smoking a pipe indoors—"about five hundred times, I think"—whereupon he hurls it out the window. It lands, to his horror, with a son-in-law named Lord Worthnotten-Forgot, who pockets it. The wife scrambles into the shrubbery to retrieve it before nightfall. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for decades—one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper syndication. McManus's crisp Art Nouveau linework and his recurring characters Maggie and Jiggs helped solidify the visual conventions—guttered panels, integrated speech balloons, comedic timing across sequential frames—that newspaper dailies exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.

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