Bringing Up Father — buf390615

A baby utters its first word — "DA!" — sending the surrounding women into rapture while a bemused man looks on. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, starring Irish immigrant-made-rich Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This daily strip shows McManus's clean Art Deco linework: elegantly dressed figures, curvilinear furniture, and tightly sequenced panels that build a single punchline across eight beats. The strip ran for decades in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, making it one of the most syndicated comics in history. Such newspaper dailies and Sunday pages were the direct seedbed of the comic book — their panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast established the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics codified into a new medium by the late 1930s.