From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf400223
· February 23, 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 daily, dated 2-23 in the plate, follows the strip's central dynamic: Maggie, the socially ambitious wife, berates her husband Jiggs across four panels for not knowing where Memphis is. The gag builds through escalating insult — "you ignorant fool" — before resolving with Maggie marching to an atlas. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: elegant Art Nouveau linework, crosshatched interiors, and expressive silhouette poses. Newspaper strips like this one invented the formal vocabulary of sequential art — recurring cast, numbered panels, speech balloons — that comic books, emerging as reprint collections in the 1930s, directly inherited.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain