Bringing Up Father — buf400228

Four panels follow a baby's babbling ('Da-Da-Da-Da-') through a telephone crisis: an exasperated father, pulled from a long-distance call, must say something sweet to the child — who promptly erupts into full-throated wailing ('Wa-a-a-a-a'). George McManus draws in his characteristic art-nouveau-inflected line: patterned wallpaper, expressive hair-standing-on-end, and speech balloons scaled to the volume of the noise inside them. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated nationally from 1913, made Jiggs and Maggie household names across three decades of daily strips and Sunday pages. Those newspaper pages — not comic books — invented the medium's grammar: the gutter between panels, the recurring cast, the balloon as voice. McManus was among the handful of artists who turned that grammar into something visually sophisticated and commercially enduring.