Bringing Up Father — buf390501

Four panels follow Maggie at the telephone, relaying gushing pleasantries from a relative — *"the darling boy, he is so very thoughtful"* — while Jiggs, summoned from his armchair mid-newspaper, learns the punch line: the darling boy wants fifty dollars. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it as a daily and Sunday strip for decades. McManus's clean Art Nouveau line work — elaborate hair, checked suits, tiled floors rendered in confident brushwork — became one of the most widely syndicated strips on earth. Strips like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book: their panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast established the visual grammar that anthology reprint magazines would codify by 1933.