Bringing Up Father

Two Sunday strips share this page: Rosie's Beau, a brief domestic comedy by Geo. McManus in which hapless Archie rehearses table-setting before his landlady returns, and the main event, Bringing Up Father, also by McManus. In the latter, Jiggs and Maggie's road-trip to Pennsylvania goes predictably wrong—rain, a darkened auto-camp office, fumbling lanterns, separate cabins, and a dawn getaway that ends with Jiggs trapped in a runaway caravan. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident: rounded figures in vivid flat color, speech balloons integrated tightly into diagonal compositions, and a panel rhythm that builds gags across tiers like vaudeville timing on paper. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the first recurring-character strips syndicated nationwide, and its Sunday page format—multiple tiers, color printing, self-contained weekly story—directly shaped the anthology reprints that became the first commercial comic books in the early 1930s.