Bringing Up Father — buf370116

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie's monologue of nostalgic grievances: a boy buried in attic clutter, the rotund Jiggs lounging in kitchen contentment with fan and bucket, children envying a classmate whose mumps excuse him from school, and Jiggs's Uncle Binny ensconced at his railroad flagman post. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running American strips. His linework — confident brush outlines, patterned fabrics rendered in crosshatch, expressive balloon placement — helped codify the visual language that daily newspaper strips passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s: the panel grid, the recurring cast, the gag-per-beat rhythm that readers learned to scan left to right without instruction.