From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf400216
· ca. 1940 (King Features Syndicate)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs four panels here, its familiar cast — the hapless, cigar-chewing Jiggs and the imperious Maggie — navigating social pretension with clockwork comic precision. A society caller, Mrs. De Veyate, lectures the household on manners; Jiggs confesses they missed Mardi Gras in New Orleans; Maggie corrects him — Mardi Gras is a festival, not a person — landing the strip's signature punchline of class-anxious ignorance punished by a wife's withering correction. McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship, elegant crosshatching, and expressive figure staging represent newspaper syndication at its commercial peak. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the daily strips whose reprint anthologies physically created the comic book format, making McManus's work foundational to the medium's material history.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain