Bringing Up Father — buf391111

Four panels follow a domestic standoff over olives. A stout, vest-wearing man confronts a woman who has been quietly pocketing olives from every meal on their trip; pressed to explain, she reveals she saves them precisely so she won't have to eat them — the final panel closes on a baffled question mark. *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus and syndicated from 1913, centered the upwardly-mobile Irish-American Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. McManus's draftsmanship — bold ink outlines, art-nouveau interior detail, expressive silhouettes — set a visual standard that dailies like this one exported worldwide. Newspaper comic strips such as this were the direct ancestor of the comic book: their recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the grammar later collected into the first newsstand comic books of the 1930s.