Bringing Up Father — buf370330

Four panels by George McManus track the hapless Jiggs as his wife Maggie prepares extravagantly for a London coronation trip. A daughter urges Jiggs to reason with Maggie; he sputters that she'll have them locked in the Tower of London on arrival; Maggie, magnificent in an enormous heart-patterned gown, threatens to crown *him* on the spot. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable — Art Nouveau-inflected flourishes, immaculate cross-hatching, and a heroine whose elaborate costume fills the final panel with decorative bravado. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously for decades, its domestic-comedy engine powering the daily-strip format that directly seeded the first comic books, which were initially reprints of exactly such newspaper pages.