Bringing Up Father — buf390311

Four panels follow a domestic crisis: a woman demands to know where her lazy brother is sleeping; a man explains he arranged a tennis match with their daughter and Oliver Towne; a third figure reports the brother is awake — a miracle, since he's apparently working; outdoors in tennis whites, two players learn the match is cancelled because Mother's brother won't rise until suppertime. The strip's cramped, energetic linework and stacked speech balloons typify George McManus's long-running *Bringing Up Father* (debut 1913), whose Irish-immigrant social climbers Maggie and Jiggs appeared in hundreds of papers worldwide. McManus refined the visual grammar — reactive faces, sight-gag staging, panel-to-panel continuity — that newspaper dailies handed directly to the first comic-book reprint anthologies of the 1930s.