Bringing Up Father — buf371211

Four panels track the domestic collision between Maggie, who wants classical music on the radio, and Jiggs, who is tuned to a football broadcast—his sportscaster's frantic yardage-line patter rendered as an unbroken verbal avalanche. A woman singing operatic scales gets a flat "BAH!" from Jiggs before he is launched, airborne, into the final panel. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running American strips. McManus's draftsmanship—fluid Art Nouveau flourishes on wallpaper and dress hems, figures mid-arc against ruled architectural backgrounds—was among the most sophisticated in daily syndication. Daily strips like this one, clipped and collected, literally became the first comic books; their recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panels are the direct grammar every subsequent comics artist inherited.