Bringing Up Father — buf370709

Four daily panels by George McManus follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic comedy hinging on a missing person named "Fifi" and a hapless detective who cannot locate their own house. The strip's visual rhythm is economical: two figures anchoring each panel, erupting hair conveying alarm, speech balloons carrying the full comic load. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running American strips; its class-anxious Irish-immigrant couple helped define the recurring-character daily comic. Such newspaper dailies — with their standardized panels and balloon dialogue — directly supplied the page format and storytelling grammar that early comic-book publishers reprinted wholesale in the 1930s, making the newspaper strip the true cradle of the American comic book.