Bringing Up Father — buf390123

Four daily panels follow Maggie, the socially ambitious wife, monopolizing a telephone call with chatter about hats, squirrel-skin gowns, and Mrs. Iva Lottulurn's tea-party outfit, while Jiggs — her hen-pecked, round-faced husband — stands waiting, hat in hand. The running gag: a visitor arrives needing to reach Maggie, is told she can't be interrupted, and is invited to sleep in a chair where her husband has already been stranded for three hours. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean brush line, expressive figures, and rapid-fire balloon dialogue made it one of the most syndicated strips worldwide, directly modeling the page layout and sequential grammar that early comic-book publishers lifted wholesale when they began reprinting newspaper dailies in pamphlet form during the 1930s.