Bringing Up Father — buf330820

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — syndicated from 1913 and eventually running in over 700 papers — follows Jiggs, a newly wealthy Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This Sunday page tracks a vacation departure: luggage chaos, a mad dash through a train station, a mistaken pocket-book, a cry of "Thief!", and Jiggs cooling off at home instead of the seashore. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — Art Nouveau curves in the architecture, crisp silhouettes, expressive body language carrying gags across panels without redundant dialogue. Sunday newspaper strips like this one *are* the comic book's direct ancestor: the multi-panel sequence, the speech balloon, the recurring cast, the cliffhanger cut — all codified here, weekly, decades before the pamphlet format existed.