Bringing Up Father — buf370108

Four panels follow Maggie haranguing Jiggs through a litany of family embarrassments — his shyness at the circus, little Nora's botched homework, a brother's suspicious new suit, a stuck-up Aunt Kitty's captain husband and his yacht. George McManus draws his characters in crisp ink line with patterned clothing and expressive silhouettes; Maggie dominates each panel, rolling pin implied by posture alone. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the most-read cartoonists of the century. The daily strip format — sequential panels, speech balloons, a recurring cast — was exactly the visual grammar that early comic-book publishers would soon collect and reprint, making newspaper comics the direct ancestor of the American comic book.