Bringing Up Father — buf361229

Four panels track a rambling reminiscence among a crowd of policemen (panel 1), a domestic street scene outside a row house (panel 2), a figure sprawled unconscious on a garden wall (panel 3), and a procession of cats trailing a girl through a neighborhood (panel 4). Speech balloons carry long, breathless run-on sentences typical of George McManus's working-class Irish-American milieu. McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate beginning in 1913, following social-climber Maggie and her reluctant husband Jiggs. The strip belongs to the first generation of syndicated dailies whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons established the visual grammar later collected into the first comic books of the 1930s.