Bringing Up Father — buf400217

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. In this four-panel daily, the hen-pecked Jiggs quietly decides to pack everything before wife Maggie wakes, congratulating himself on a job well done — only for Maggie to appear in the final panel and announce she has changed their travel plans entirely. McManus's linework is lush and Art Nouveau-inflected, his figures broad and physical, his compositions packed with flying luggage and domestic chaos. Strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: the recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons pioneered by McManus and his contemporaries literally invented the visual grammar that anthology comic books would systematize by decade's end.