Bringing Up Father — buf370222

Four panels in George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, the long-running daily launched in 1913. Here Jiggs catches his wife Maggie mid-tirade: she weeps that she could have married a society gentleman, that he is a failure beneath her station, a handicap to her refinement. Jiggs disarms her — "you were so beautiful in those days" — melting her fury. McManus's linework is elegant, his women costumed in dotted fabric, chandeliers framing domestic war. The strip belongs to the generation of newspaper dailies — alongside *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat* — whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the visual grammar that direct-anthology reprint volumes would soon package as the first comic books.