Bringing Up Father — buf400325

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic comedy of social ambition: Maggie announces a dinner invitation for Senator Hammond Kakes, a rising political figure; an unseen woman's off-panel singing provokes the throwaway gag that closes the strip. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's crisp art deco linework—decorative wallpaper, elegantly curved furniture, characters rendered with rubbery expressiveness—influenced a generation of cartoonists. The daily and Sunday strips he and his peers produced were literally cut, reprinted, and stapled into the first comic books of the 1930s, making the newspaper page the direct ancestor of the medium.