Bringing Up Father — buf401005

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the long-suffering Jiggs, here roped into finding factory workers by an unseen friend. Across four panels his wife schemes to send him off, he visits a neighbor about the job, and three hours later returns bewildered: his wife asked her father, then his brothers, who fought over the position until she fainted. McManus's fluid brushwork and exuberant crosshatching — note the ornate dress patterns and the doorway lamp — exemplify the draftsmanship that made this strip a daily institution from 1913 onward. Strips like this one, syndicated coast to coast by King Features, supplied the raw material that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted, making the newspaper page the direct ancestor of the comic book format itself.