From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — April 25, 1925
· Published April 25, 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs four panels: Jiggs, in pajamas, boasts that the doctor's medicine cured his daytime sleepiness — then lies wide-eyed at 1 a.m., still awake at 3 a.m., and finally phones the doctor begging treatment for insomnia. The gag is a clean comic reversal, the cure worse than the complaint. McManus draws with confident, rounded linework and economical staging — a bedside lamp as the only prop marking the small hours. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday for decades, syndicated globally. The newspaper strip page was the direct seedbed of the comic book: its recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics of the 1930s would package and sell as a new medium.
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