Bringing Up Father — buf400121

Two Sunday pages from *Bringing Up Father*, George McManus's long-running King Features strip launched in 1913. The upper page follows Rosie practicing housekeeping before marriage, dropping dishes in a slapstick cascade of crockery. The lower pages track Jiggs and Maggie on a rainy road trip near Erie, Pennsylvania — a dark auto camp, a lantern-lit cabin mix-up, a squabbling morning departure, and a finale in which Maggie is discovered as a stowaway in someone's car trunk. McManus's rounded Art Nouveau linework, his elaborate crosshatching on fabrics, and his fluid panel-to-panel staging were formative for the medium. Sunday pages like these — self-contained, color-printed, with interlocking gag sequences — were the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book format that emerged in the same decade.