Bringing Up Father — buf390807

Four panels follow Maggie and Jiggs, George McManus's long-running Irish-American couple, through a parlor farewell scene. A woman announces she and her husband sail for London; the little man reads a newspaper, frets about loneliness; spotting his wife weeping, he smugly predicts tears — then the final panel reveals a young woman singing dreamily about spring and love, puncturing his self-satisfaction. McManus's draftsmanship is ornate: crosshatched wallpaper, patterned dresses, expressive rubber-limbed figures. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 with King Features and ran decades, its domestic comedy and consistent characters exemplifying how syndicated newspaper dailies — not yet collected into pamphlets — established the recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and speech-balloon conventions that the comic book industry would directly inherit.