Bringing Up Father — buf391227

Three panels show Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in his dressing gown, eagerly plotting a fishing trip with a pal while his wife Maggie is absent — until her voice penetrates the room, freezing both men with twin question marks hovering over their heads. The final panel reveals Maggie herself, curlers in hair, crown-patterned robe, furious: Jiggs has sat on his fishhooks. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean brush line, expressive silhouettes, and choreographed panel-to-panel timing made it one of the most syndicated strips in the world. The newspaper daily strip — not the comic book — invented the grammar: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying character voice. McManus's Sunday pages were among the first reprinted in collected pamphlet form, the direct ancestor of the comic book format.