Bringing Up Father Sunday 9/24/22 by Geo McManus

I have a bit of an addiction to the art of George McManus. Maybe it is a bit more than a bit...I love this guy's art!!!

This is a pretty early Sunday, 1922! Heck, Skeezix had just had his first birthday a few months earlier in another strip and now he is over 100 years old. So, for a strip that is 103 years old later this summer, it is pretty remarkable that it survived and his work is as fun as it ever was. I really liked the topper panel and panel 6 in terms of humor and design. I have included detailed scans in the extra images for these 2 panels. The rest of the Sunday is great but the guys hanging off wires high above the city below reminds me of all those pictures of workers without any safety equipment high above NYC in the 1920's. It was the time modern America was being built and one could say the same for comics and comic strips. This was such an important decade in comic strips and of course comics books would a little while in coming still and of course the birth of superhero comics would have to wait for almost another 20 years from this point.

When people ask me what I collect. I say comic art but mention I seem to focus on everything but superheroes. I will often add my specialty seems to be comic strips between 1900 and 1945 with a particular interest in the era of 1915-1925 and 1934 which arguably the most important years in comic history. McManus was there for all of that having created his first strip in 1904 and had early success. Bringing Up Father (BUF for short) began in 1913 and ran for 97 years. McManus was a larger than life character and celebrity in his day. He was friends with other artists of his day like Winsor McCay and it is a bet between him and McCay that led to the first animated movie, Gertie the Dinosaur. I could go on about McManus for some time, he was quite a character but it was his art that drew me to him. His sense of design is genius level. His ability to draw characters is also fun and he could draw a room with 150 characters and make them all look completely different. Later, in the 40's and 50's he would hire Zeke Zekeley to assist and it was probably around this time my favorite element to BUF strips was added which were the characters in picture frames being animated. So much fun but this Sunday predates that gag by probably 20 years.

As Rob mentioned below in the comments, the color was common in certain Sundays of this period, depending on the publisher. Each unique item would need be colored once to give the printer a guide on what to do.