Bringing Up Father — buf400323

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. The central gag — nouveau-riche Jiggs yearning to escape his social-climbing wife Maggie — plays out here in four compact panels: Maggie harangues Jiggs about ingratitude while he placates her, then Jiggs arrives at a senator's office hoping to dodge a political lecture by claiming he 'just left one.' McManus drew in a crisp, decorative line influenced by Art Nouveau, his crosshatched suits and bold outlines immediately legible in newsprint reduction. Strips like this one, syndicated coast to coast as daily and Sunday pages from the 1910s onward, supplied both the content and the format — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — that early comic-book publishers would simply reprint and, eventually, imitate.