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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf410809

· August 10, 1941 (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf410809
George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page deploys the strip's signature full-page layout: a cascade of interlocking panels in which Maggie catalogues her musically 'talented' relations to a glazed Jiggs. Each vignette delivers its own sight gag — a brother living in a piano crate, a nephew blowing trombone holes through walls, a whistler now called 'Hansom Dan' after losing his teeth. McManus's draftsmanship is elaborate and assured: billowing skirts, exaggerated silhouettes, and densely cross-hatched backgrounds. His fluid integration of speech balloons into composition helped standardize the visual grammar that daily strips exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.

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