Bringing Up Father — buf390307

Four panels show a stout, checked-suited man sleeping on a bench while a spiky-haired boy schemes to wake him by letting a garden hose drip on him — only to climb a ladder and trigger a flowerpot that drops squarely on his own head. *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus for King Features Syndicate beginning in 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie through domestic comedy for over sixty years. McManus's draftsmanship — crisp ink line, confident figure silhouettes, expressive balloon lettering — exemplifies the daily newspaper strip format that directly seeded the comic book: anthology reprint collections of newspaper dailies, sold at newsstands from the early 1930s, established the page size, stapled format, and sequential panel grammar that defined the medium.