Bringing Up Father — buf391020

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication from 1913 into the 1950s, making it one of the longest-lived gag strips in American newspaper history. This two-panel daily shows Jiggs and Maggie caught between two spectacles: a vigorous Native American dance on the left ("That's what they call the Indian Dance"), which sends the pair fleeing toward their hotel, and a frenetic ballroom scene on the right where the tuxedoed dancers move with equal abandon — the punchline being that the hotel crowd looks no more restrained. McManus's draftsmanship is meticulous: crosshatched crowds, expressive silhouettes, and tightly composed panels. Strips like this one, reproduced millions of times in daily papers, supplied the visual grammar — recurring characters, speech balloons, sequential panels — that Eastern Color's 1933 *Funnies on Parade* repackaged into the first true comic books.