Bringing Up Father — buf370507

Four dailies by George McManus (signed twice in this strip) show Jiggs dispatched by wife Maggie to a fox-hunting lodge, despite knowing nothing about the sport. She insists she told him so; he arrives rigged out in full hunting regalia, only to return almost immediately — the dogs tried to bite him. McManus's line is clean and confident: his women tower and gesticulate, Jiggs shrinks and shuffles, the staging moves left-to-right with crisp speech-balloon choreography. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers for decades and was among the first strips collected into book form, directly anticipating the comic-book format. McManus's fluid draftsmanship and mastery of recurring-character comedy made him one of the architects of the American newspaper strip as a sustained narrative art.