ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf390918

· ca. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

Bringing Up Father — buf390918
Three panels set on Hollywood Boulevard: Jiggs and a companion observe a crowd surrounding a man who fancies himself a film director — someone asks where his horse is. A child requests his autograph. The final panel shifts to the Pink Dip restaurant, where a rumor that a movie star is dining has drawn a crush of rubberneckers. George McManus's linework is fluid and confident, his figures elegantly caricatured in top hats and polka dots. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the longest-running American newspaper strips, syndicated worldwide. McManus helped codify the daily comic strip's visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format that would crystallize commercially by decade's end.

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