Bringing Up Father — buf400507

Three panels of George McManus's long-running daily strip follow Jiggs and Maggie on a trip — likely to Amarillo, where Maggie asks why he looks depressed. He confesses he is homesick, thinking of their son; she fantasizes aloud about sitting on their front porch; Maggie shuts him down, accusing him of always thinking of himself and spoiling the trip. McManus's line work is unmistakable: the ornate crosshatching, decorative wallpaper and vase motifs, the exaggerated expressions. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated in hundreds of papers. Strips like this one — printed daily and in Sunday color pages — supplied the physical pages that early publishers trimmed, bound, and sold as the first comic books in the 1930s.