Bringing Up Father — buf390610

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1930 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip opens with Maggie dispatching her husband Jiggs to phone in baby-name suggestions mailed in by readers — a rare fourth-wall device folding the readership into the gag. The middle panels show Jiggs and a companion outside, then the final two reveal an overwhelmed mail carrier buried under an avalanche of reader letters, Maggie commanding Jiggs to help sort them. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: confident brushwork, decorative black silhouettes, and clean speech balloons carrying the entire comic rhythm. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies — sequential panels, recurring characters, visual shorthand — built the grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale.