Bringing Up Father — buf371203

Four daily panels by George McManus show Jiggs charmed by a singing woman at a party — "You have to cultivate a taste for olives, but not for a peach like you" — then dozing in an armchair as snores fill the panel with oversized Z's, then scolded by his wife Maggie for the racket. McManus's line work is fluid and elegant, his figures rounded and expressive, his lettering muscular. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated by King Features from 1913, was among the strips that gave newspaper comics their durable grammar: sequential panels, speech balloons anchored to speakers, recurring cast, compressed comic timing. Those daily and Sunday pages are the direct precursors of the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.