Bringing Up Father — buf370211

George McManus's daily strip *Bringing Up Father* — here a single wide panel crowded with a chaotic neighborhood picnic — exemplifies the bravura draftsmanship that made the strip, launched in 1913, one of King Features' most widely syndicated properties. A narrator caption recalls fly-infested outings in Dinny Colman's coal wagon; amid the mayhem, an ice-cream vendor hawks his wares while Jiggs and Maggie's social-climbing circle presses in from every edge. McManus's line work is fluid and confident: crosshatched shadows, exaggerated silhouettes, and dense figure groupings that move the eye laterally across the strip. Newspaper dailies and Sunday pages like this one supplied the page-layout conventions — panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — that printers would soon bind into the first comic books.