Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Maggie's scheme: she dresses in new finery, surprises her husband Jiggs, asks how she looks — and Jiggs, seated and oblivious, laughs. Her fury is instant; the final panel shows him locked outside, pleading at the door. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper syndication. McManus's art — Art Nouveau curves, precise crosshatching, expressive silhouettes — set a visual standard for daily comic strips. The strip itself belongs to the generation of newspaper pages that established the formal grammar of comics: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying both dialogue and character. Those syndicated pages are the direct ancestors of the comic book as a print form.