From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf391021
· c. 1939 (copyright date visible in strip)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 until well past his 1954 death, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-lived characters in American newspaper comics. This daily strip shows Jiggs and a companion dressed in full Plains-style regalia, apparently arranged by the hotel proprietor to welcome a visiting tribal chief. Four tight panels move from Jiggs's bewildered aside through a naming gag — "Wannatomahawk means Beautiful Rose" — to the chief's arrival and a butler's deadpan greeting. McManus's line work is characteristically precise: fluid figures, confident ink, minimal backgrounds that force focus on dialogue. His use of recurring domestic characters navigating social pretension helped establish the situation-comedy strip as a durable newspaper format, and his visual shorthand — reaction beats, overlapping speech balloons — fed directly into the page grammar that early comic-book compilers inherited wholesale.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain