Bringing Up Father — buf361228

Four panels follow Maggie and Jiggs, George McManus's long-running married couple, through a rapid-fire reminiscence: Maggie recounts a courtship tale involving lost jobs and two hundred dollars earned at a slaughterhouse, while the strip cuts to a child being bribed for a penny, a fainting episode revived by a glass of water, and a chaotic riverside fishing party. McManus's line work is distinctively ornate — heavily decorated costumes, expressive silhouettes, and kinetic crowd scenes crowd every panel. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first newspaper strips exported internationally and proved that recurring comic characters could anchor reader loyalty across decades. Its daily format — tight, self-contained gag panels with integrated speech balloons — directly shaped the page grammar that early comic-book publishers would inherit wholesale when they began reprinting newspaper strips as bound pamphlets in the early 1930s.