Bringing Up Father — buf390629

Four panels track a sleepless household: a crying baby keeps the father up all night while his wife rests in bed; by morning she congratulates him for enduring it—then scolds his snoring with a question-mark panel for comic punctuation. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for decades through King Features Syndicate. His signature style—Art Nouveau–inflected furniture, crosshatched tuxedos, and expressive balloon lettering—made Jiggs and Maggie internationally recognizable. McManus inherited the visual grammar Outcault and Dirks had pioneered: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast. Those newspaper strips, collected and reprinted, supplied the direct material and format that early comic books physically reproduced, making the daily strip page the true structural ancestor of the comic book medium.