Bringing Up Father — buf390720

Four panels follow the social-climbing Jiggs household through a domestic crisis: a son's elopement, a tray-borne telegram, and the arrival of an unexpected mother-in-law who turns tearful surprise into strained cordiality. George McManus's brushwork is confident and round—bulbous noses, frizzy hair, expressive hands—his speech balloons integrated cleanly into each composition. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913 by King Features, was among the longest-running and most globally distributed strips of its era, translated into dozens of languages. McManus refined the visual shorthand—sequential panels, balloon dialogue, recurring cast—that daily newspaper strips codified before comic books existed as a format, making strips like this one the direct ancestor of the stapled pamphlet medium that followed.