From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf400122
· ca. 1940 (copyright line: King Features Syndicate, Inc.)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American laborer, perpetually bullied by his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here she dispatches him to the U.S. Capitol to befriend Senator Hugh Budgitt; Jiggs mutters that listening to the Senator will be no worse than her lectures at home, then discovers the Senator sound asleep mid-snore. Four panels, clean ink line, expressive silhouette against the Capitol dome, Z's floating from the sleeping legislator — classic McManus economy. Launched in 1913, the strip ran over four decades and circulated in hundreds of papers worldwide, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly informing the comic-book format that editors and publishers would codify through the 1930s and '40s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain