Bringing Up Father — buf390131

Four panels follow Maggie, exasperated at a perpetually busy telephone line, as Mr. Dinout arrives to apologize — only to explain that *his* wife has monopolized the phone for two hours. The strip closes with a rapid-fire social question about bridge. George McManus's clean ink line, crosshatched suits, and expressive silhouettes are classic here: stiff formal wear signals class anxiety, speech balloons crowd panels with overlapping complaint. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, traced Irish immigrant Jiggs's impossible climb into respectability beside his domineering wife. By 1939 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. Newspaper comic strips like this one — daily and Sunday — invented the sequential art grammar that comic books, launched commercially just that year, would inherit wholesale.