Bringing Up Father — buf390901

Four-panel daily strip by George McManus, *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running continuity strips in American newspaper history. Here Jiggs plots to join Lord Worthnotten's African elephant-hunting expedition, weighing his desire to escape against his certainty that wife Maggie will erupt — her question-mark balloon and sharp silhouette doing the comic work wordlessly. McManus's brushwork is elegant: thick-and-thin ink lines, cross-hatched upholstery, figures posed with almost vaudeville precision. Strips like this one — printed daily across hundreds of papers — were the direct raw material for the first comic books, which initially reprinted newspaper pages before original content emerged in the late 1930s.