Bringing Up Father — buf370526

Four panels, black ink on newsprint: Jiggs's wife instructs him to treat caller Mr. Beaver nicely; Jiggs mutters she wouldn't understand if he did. Mr. Beaver then tries to recommend his new *barber* — Jiggs bolts in horror at the sight of the man's wild, explosive haircut. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for over four decades. McManus's draftsmanship — fluid Art Nouveau linework, patterned suits, expressive silhouettes — set a visual standard for newspaper strips. Those strips, collected and reprinted from the 1890s onward, directly seeded the first comic books; the panel, the speech balloon, and the recurring cast that readers followed strip-to-strip are McManus's working inheritance to the form.