Bringing Up Father — buf390617

Four panels follow the domestic standoff familiar to readers of George McManus's long-running daily strip, launched in 1913. A stout, flower-hatted wife and her lanky daughter browbeat two men into moving a heavy library chair; the men plead doctor's orders and physical weakness — then a crawling baby shoves the chair effortlessly across the room, landing the punchline in the final panel's stunned reaction shot. McManus's draftsmanship is precise and decorative: thick ink outlines, bold black fills, and floral wallpaper patterns betray his Art Nouveau training. *Bringing Up Father* — featuring the social-climbing Maggie and her hen-pecked husband Jiggs — ran in syndication for decades and helped standardize the horizontal daily strip format, the recurring cast, and the timed visual gag that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.