Bringing Up Father — buf390719

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic crisis: their daughter has eloped, and Maggie weeps while Jiggs delivers increasingly exasperated asides — until a wailing baby in the final panel threatens to wake the neighborhood. George McManus, who signed the strip for decades, draws in his trademark art-nouveau-inflected line: heavy blacks, patterned wallpaper, and rubbery figures whose emotions read instantly across a half-inch newspaper column. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran continuously for over eighty years, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's recurring cast, stable visual shorthand, and week-to-week continuity helped establish the conventions — panel sequence, speech balloons, character consistency — that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.