From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf400204
· ca. 1940 (King Features Syndicate)

Six tiers of Sunday-page panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic spat and a chaotic automobile tour of Detroit — past Grand Boulevard, Belle Isle, and the Ambassador Bridge — ending in a traffic jam that traps them for four hours. George McManus's line work is immediately recognizable: thick outlines, Art Deco interiors, characters built from broad gestures and expressive hats. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, making it one of the longest continuous strips in American newspaper history. McManus refined the visual conventions — symmetrical panel grids, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that Sunday pages exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain