Bringing Up Father

George McManus's Bringing Up Father ran from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Jiggs and Maggie — nouveaux-riche Irish immigrants — as a deputy sheriff repossesses their house, forcing the family to haul belongings by car to a rural shack. McManus parcels the story across eleven panels, deploying speech balloons, sequential action, and a recurring cast with shorthand visual personalities: Maggie imperious and bonneted, Jiggs round and resigned. The strip's fluid Art Nouveau linework — McManus trained on decorative illustration — distinguishes it from rougher contemporaries. Sunday pages like this one, printed in color rotogravure, are the direct ancestors of the comic book format publishers began packaging just a decade later.