Bringing Up Father — buf400606

Four panels of telephone comedy: Jiggs fields a call from Sonny while simultaneously learning—through the fractured relay of the conversation—that his wife Maggie's car has apparently caught fire near his own. McManus draws the strip in his characteristic Art Nouveau-inflected line: curvaceous borders, crosshatched shadows, and expressive rubber-faced characters whose hair and eyes do nearly all the acting. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the longest-running and most widely syndicated strips in American newspaper history. Those syndicated Sunday pages and dailies are not merely precursors to the comic book—they *are* its cradle, establishing the sequential panel grid, the speech balloon, and the recurring cast that define the medium's visual grammar to this day.