Bringing Up Father — buf371101

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This 1937 daily shows four panels of tight domestic comedy: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant-made-good, savors a quiet house, phones his pal Dugan to arrange a card game, then is immediately swamped by a crowd of children demanding football, movies, lollipops, food, and something they can't finish spelling aloud. McManus's line work is assured and decorative — Art Nouveau flourishes on lamps and moldings sit beside broad slapstick figures. Daily newspaper strips like this one, syndicated to hundreds of papers simultaneously, taught readers to follow sequential panels and speech balloons, and their collected reprints became the direct commercial template for the comic book format that crystallized in 1933–1938.