Bringing Up Father — buf371006

Four panels follow Mrs. Jiggs singing loudly at the piano while someone knocks unheard at the door. Jiggs interrupts to apologize — he has fielded a noise complaint — only to trigger her indignant retort: the neighbor phoned *to complain about her singing*. The final panel lands in mutual bafflement. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for over four decades. His clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and elegant interior settings distinguished the strip visually; his recurring domestic-argument structure became a template for generations of gag cartoonists. The daily newspaper strip format McManus helped perfect — sequential panels, speech balloons, a cast readers followed like soap-opera characters — was the direct ancestor of the American comic book, which emerged largely by reprinting such pages in the early 1930s.