From the exhibition
Bringing Up Father — buf420524f
· May 24, 1942 (dateline visible lower left)

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs here through twelve panels of domestic slapstick: Maggie and daughter leave Jiggs home alone; a delivery man drops a ticking package; Jiggs, convinced it's a time-bomb, summons a police squad too busy playing gin rummy to respond promptly; the box goes in the river. Maggie returns to ask whether her five-hundred-dollar antique clock arrived. McManus's draftsmanship is confident and rounded — top-hatted Jiggs rendered in bold ink line, figures silhouetted in doorways, small inset panels carrying continuity. Launched by King Features in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips syndicated globally, and its recurring cast, sequential panel logic, and speech-balloon shorthand directly shaped the visual conventions that comic books would codify by decade's end.
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