ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf430912f

· George McManus, King Features Syndicate (date unconfirmed)

Bringing Up Father — buf430912f
George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Maggie's social catastrophe: her dinner-party guest list appears in the society column, triggering a cascade of cancellations as each invitee discovers who else is coming. McManus renders the chaos across twelve panels — letters, telegrams, and telephone calls multiplying the humiliation — while Jiggs slips away to eat with his working-class pals. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his figures expressive without caricature. Sunday pages like this one are the direct ancestor of the comic book: same panel grammar, same speech balloons, same recurring cast that readers followed week after week across decades.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain