From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf391122
· c. 1930 (copyright notice visible in strip)

Three panels follow Jiggs and his well-dressed companion waiting at Randolph and Dearborn Streets in Chicago for their wives, who are already six hours overdue. A store clerk posts a sign — "Special Bargain Today: Dresses ½ Price" — and the third panel erupts into a stampede of frenzied shoppers swallowing the two men whole. George McManus's draftsmanship is characteristically elegant: crosshatched suits, expressive crowd silhouettes, and precise lettering in hand-drawn balloons. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades in syndication, making McManus one of the architects of the recurring-character daily strip — the direct ancestor of the comic book page, transplanting panel grids, speech balloons, and visual timing from newsprint into the bound pamphlets that followed.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain