Bringing Up Father — buf400605

Four panels follow the domestic tangle of Jiggs and Maggie: a secretary can't rouse Jiggs by phone because he's asleep at his office desk; Maggie, rendered as a bold silhouette in panel two, relays instructions to have her car ready; Jiggs responds with a baffled "HUH?"; the punchline lands when a boy reports the car burned up that morning. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it until his death in 1954 — one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus's draftsmanship, influenced by Art Nouveau and Winsor McCay, gave the strip its distinctive thick-and-thin linework. Sunday pages like this one, reproduced weekly in registers nationwide, supplied the page-format and sequential grammar that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and later imitated.