Bringing Up Father — buf370515

Four daily panels by George McManus follow Maggie and Jiggs in England, where Maggie—newly famous from newspaper coverage—receives a visitor: not a duchess or baron, but Miss Tilly O'Finnigan from the old neighborhood near the Bang's House. McManus's line is fluid and decorative, his women drawn with elaborate hats and polka-dot dresses, his interiors suggesting nouveau-riche aspiration. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, one of the longest-lived strips in American syndication. These newspaper dailies are the direct ancestors of the comic book: the panel grid, speech balloons, and recurring cast that McManus and his contemporaries refined became the visual grammar that anthology reprint magazines—the first comic books—simply paginated and stapled.