Bringing Up Father — buf370323

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic standoff. Jiggs argues they needn't attend a coronation in person — radio and movies will do — while Maggie, enthroned in an armchair wearing her crown-like hair arrangement, rebuts each excuse. By the final panel she is already at the door, ordering him to fetch steamship tickets. McManus's linework is confident and economical: heavy blacks against cross-hatched grays, expressive rubbery faces, and speech balloons that carry the full comic weight. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first newspaper strips to build a global readership on a single recurring domestic joke, and McManus's clean, art-deco-inflected draftsmanship helped establish the visual conventions — panel borders, balloon placement, character continuity — that daily strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.