Bringing Up Father — buf390704

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's working-class-immigrant-made-good couple, through a drawing-room scene: Jiggs bids farewell to 'Grand-daddy,' while Maggie and a son-in-law debate their daughter's marriage prospects — she hopes for a European nobleman with a castle; the final panel cuts to a silhouetted figure on a rooftop, apparently Maggie's brother Dinty freezing in the cold. McManus's line is fluid and art-deco elegant, his speech balloons precisely letttered. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran as a syndicated daily and Sunday strip for decades, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly feeding the anthology reprint comics — *Famous Funnies* and their kin — that became the first true comic books.