Bringing Up Father — buf390429

Four panels track a domestic standoff: Maggie, tiara'd and imperious, informs her husband Jiggs that Mr. Sam Pulhouse and their son's new bride are visiting, triggering a full household reallocation — music room to playroom, guest room to nurse, Jiggs's smoking room to baby's breakfast room. Jiggs's deadpan counterpunch: build him a doghouse with electricity. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable — bold ink lines, crosshatched black suits, Maggie's elaborate coiffure as visual shorthand for social ambition. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus refined the visual grammar of the speech balloon and sequential panel transition that newspaper comics handed wholesale to the emerging comic-book format of the late 1930s.