From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf401130
· c. 1940 (King Features Syndicate)

Four panels follow Jiggs through a real-estate swindle that circles back to bite everyone. A seller reassures Jiggs he isn't being cheated; Jiggs's wife Maggie gushes that the property was sold at a profit; a banker is mentioned as buyer; the final panel reveals the family owns it again — punchline delivered by a wailing figure: *"We own it agin!"* George McManus drew Bringing Up Father from 1913 until his death in 1954, syndicating it to hundreds of papers worldwide. His fluid Art Nouveau linework, spotted blacks, and precise architectural rendering set a visual standard for the daily strip. Strips like this one fed directly into early comic-book reprint anthologies — *Famous Funnies* (1934) assembled exactly such newspaper pages — making McManus a founding figure of the medium's print form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain