From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf400127
· ca. January 27, 1940 (King Features Syndicate)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday daily follows Jiggs, the newly wealthy Irish-American social climber, and his imperious wife Maggie. Here, the family debates attending a grand parade downtown — Saint Paul or Minneapolis — while Jiggs, predictably, slips away into the crowd. A woman calls him over, prompting the aside: *"By Jove — if he is one of the judges, I admire his judgment."* McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: ink-heavy crowd scenes, elegant cross-hatching, and characters defined by silhouette. The strip belongs to the foundational era when newspaper pages — Sunday comics especially — established the visual grammar of sequential art: recurring characters, speech balloons, panel-to-panel continuity. Those weekly pages are the direct ancestors of the comic book form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain