Bringing Up Father — buf371110

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie fretting over her absent brother to her husband Jiggs, who reads a paper and half-listens. A newsboy erupts through the middle panels hawking an extra about a big bank robbery. In the final panel Jiggs dryly asks Maggie whether she has a sneaking suspicion her brother is in town — her 'Really?' landing the punchline. George McManus draws his characters in confident ink line with decorative Art Nouveau interiors giving way to a spare street scene. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* helped standardize the daily strip's four-panel joke structure and the speech balloon's role as primary storytelling engine — formal conventions that proto-comic-book editors would inherit wholesale when anthology reprint magazines emerged in the early 1930s.