Bringing Up Father — buf370924

Four daily panels by George McManus (signed lower right). A doctor advises Mrs. Jiggs to distract her husband from his gout by occupying his mind; she obliges by singing—badly. Panel two shows her warbling *Life Is Love and Love Is Life* amid floating musical notes; panel three has her mid-aria, checking on her patient; panel four reveals he has forgotten his foot entirely because her singing has given him a splitting headache. McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. The daily strip format he refined here—tight sequential panels, speech balloons carrying all exposition, a locked cast of recurring characters—directly shaped the anthology comic books that reprinted such strips beginning in the early 1930s, inventing the medium's standard page grammar.