Bringing Up Father — buf390911

A family masses improbable mountains of luggage at a train station while a top-hatted figure frets about his cricket set and the North Pole; a portly, well-dressed man holds his watch and chain as the final panel's patriarch warns the children to pretend they like Aunt Suzie. George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie through weekly class-comedy situations drawn in McManus's elegant art-nouveau line. The strip's recurring characters, sequential panels, and expressive speech balloons exemplify the newspaper comics page as the direct ancestor of the comic book — these Sunday and daily pages taught readers worldwide how to parse sequential visual narrative.