Bringing Up Father — buf390803

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie and Jiggs, George McManus's long-running couple from *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913 onward. Here Maggie answers a telephone call and slips into breathless name-dropping — the Duke, Sir Tenly Not, Lady Hugh Asker, Lord Mee — while a question mark floats above Jiggs's top-hatted head in the final panel. McManus's line work is ornate: patterned upholstery, feathered hats, and curlicued furniture crowd every panel. His decorative excess, borrowed from Art Nouveau illustration, became a house style that other cartoonists imitated. Speech balloons, recurring domestic characters, and sequential panel rhythm — tools McManus refined daily — passed directly into comic books when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as bound pamphlets in the early 1930s, making strips like this one structural blueprints for the medium.