Bringing Up Father — buf400310

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it was running in hundreds of papers worldwide — proof that the syndicated Sunday page and daily strip were the true cradle of the comic book. This page follows Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie as they sail, apparently toward Florida, dodging shipboard society swells. McManus works in tight multi-tier grids: crowded dock scenes give way to deck confrontations and a belowdecks chair dispute, each panel crisply bordered, speech balloons hand-lettered with confident variation in weight. His ligne-claire draftsmanship — elegant Art Deco figures, precise ruled architecture — set a visual standard that influenced a generation of cartoonists who would later fill the first comic books with work learned directly from newspaper pages like this one.