Bringing Up Father — buf400222

Four panels follow Jiggs on the telephone arranging travel plans with Dinty, while his wife Maggie intercepts with an escalating series of detours — Little Rock, Roanoke, Dallas — until Jiggs, exasperated, calls Dinty back to cancel. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau-inflected line: curvaceous furniture, heavily patterned clothing, and expressive pantomime. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the longest-running American strips, its recurring cast and weekly rhythm establishing conventions — the speech balloon, the multi-panel sequence, the cliffhanger beat — that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s. McManus's draftsmanship influenced a generation of cartoonists who would define the medium.