Bringing Up Father — buf370504

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the perennial Jiggs, top-hatted and cane-carrying, sneaking home late and congratulating himself that wife Maggie is asleep — only for Big Ben's triple bong to wake her, leaving him facing her furious question mark. McManus's line work is fluid and assured: the silhouetted clock tower panel is a genuinely elegant compositional beat amid the broad domestic comedy. The strip exemplifies the daily newspaper page as the true cradle of sequential art, where recurring characters, speech balloons, and panel-to-panel cause-and-effect storytelling were refined into the grammar that would directly feed the comic book format emerging in the same decade.