Bringing Up Father — buf400506

Three panels by George McManus show Maggie breathlessly recounting a shopping trip to Amarillo while Jiggs, barely listening, mutters about horse-race results. In the second panel she praises the hotel; in the third, singing contentedly, she wonders whether Jiggs thinks of her at all — then declares she feels 'wiz home.' McManus's line is fluid and decorative, his women statuesque and elaborately hatted, his men rumpled and distracted. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its domestic sparring strip becoming one of the most widely syndicated comics on earth. The daily and Sunday newspaper page was precisely where visual storytelling's vocabulary — the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast — was forged, making strips like this the direct ancestor of the comic book.