Bringing Up Father — buf400428

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, following Jiggs—a newly rich Irish-American laborer—and his social-climbing wife Maggie. This Sunday page runs two separate story threads: the top tier plays a rainy-evening telephone gag with Maggie dodging a cab ride, while the larger lower section sends Jiggs to Pittsburgh, where a construction worker named Dugan hoists the couple onto steel girders for a skyline tour. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable—bold outlines, flat decorative color, Art Deco interiors, and characters posed with vaudevillian physicality. Speech balloons integrated into ruled panels, recurring cast, and weekly continuity: these were the structural inventions of the newspaper Sunday page that gave comic books their grammar before the pamphlet format existed.