From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf391123
· Daily strip, 1939 (copyright date visible in image)

Four panels track the domestic friction between Maggie, a sharp-tongued wife brandishing a shopping bag, and Jiggs, her henpecked husband. Maggie declares the household "dreadful" and exits; Jiggs mutters the same complaint to a bellhop; a question mark floats above a confused waiter; and in the final panel Jiggs is caught drinking an ordered bottle, blaming it on "mistake." George McManus drew the strip from 1913 until his death in 1954, his art distinguished by Art Nouveau flourishes, immaculate crosshatching, and expressive balloon lettering. *Bringing Up Father* ran in over 500 papers worldwide, and its recurring cast of fixed character types — rendered in tight sequential panels with integrated speech balloons — directly modeled the page grammar that early comic-book editors simply reprinted and then imitated.
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