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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — buf400706

· Published July 6, likely 1940s (King Features Syndicate)

Bringing Up Father — buf400706
George McManus's long-running daily strip follows the nouveau-riche Jiggs navigating domestic chaos — here, a luggage-sorting farce at what appears to be a train station or dock. A porter and several characters argue over a mountain of hat-boxes, trunks, grips, and handbags across four crowded panels; the final panel isolates Jiggs, buried under stacked luggage, asking a bewildered porter to mind it all. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and precise — rounded figures, confident ink line, cluttered comedy managed through clear sightlines. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades and helped establish the recurring-character newspaper strip as the direct ancestor of the comic book, its panel grammar and speech-balloon conventions becoming the medium's shared vocabulary.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain