Bringing Up Father — buf390113

Four panels follow the social-climbing Maggie as she answers the telephone with elaborate gentility—"Yes, this is Marguerite"—while husband Jiggs watches, baffled. When he calls her "Maggie," she erupts: *"How dare you call me Maggie? My name is Marguerite!"* The final panel has Jiggs muttering that having money doesn't inspire him to invent a fancy name for himself. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework and his locked-in domestic comedy of new-money aspiration versus old habits made the strip one of the most widely syndicated dailies in the world. These newspaper strips—their recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons—directly furnished the visual grammar that early comic book publishers collected and reprinted in the mid-1930s.