Bringing Up Father — buf400215

Four horizontal panels follow a domestic comedy hinging on a letter from Sonny. Mother rhapsodizes over his devotion while reading aloud — he's working hard, having a great time in Miami, sends his love, misses them terribly. Father's dry punchline: the miracle is that the boy *didn't* ask for money. Mother rounds on Father as a brute who can't appreciate their darling son. George McManus, who launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, drew in a fluid Art Nouveau-inflected line — ornate wallpaper, expressive gesture, characters instantly readable at newspaper scale. The strip's recurring Jiggs-and-Maggie dynamic helped establish the recurring-character strip as a commercial institution, and the Sunday pages it ran in were the direct seedbed from which the first comic books — reprinting exactly these newspaper formats — grew.