Bringing Up Father — buf391211

Four panels follow Maggie and Jiggs, George McManus's long-running Irish-American couple, through a hotel room encounter with a telegram. A bellhop delivers the wire; Maggie brightens when she reads that their son sends "all his love" — then the punchline lands: he also wants two hundred dollars. McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship is unmistakable — sculpted hair, ruffled collars, and expressive silhouettes built from confident ink lines. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, its domestic comedy reaching millions of daily readers. Those newspaper pages — not the later pamphlet reprints — are where comics' visual grammar was forged: regularized panel grids, speech balloons as narrative engine, and recurring characters readers followed across years.