Bringing Up Father — buf400607

George McManus's long-running strip follows the eternal domestic comedy of Jiggs and Maggie. In this three-panel daily, Maggie fields a telephone call about an explosion and fire involving their son's car, relaying increasingly alarming details to a bewildered Jiggs — the final panel's lone question mark punctuating the absurdist escalation. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: fluid Art Nouveau linework, exuberantly patterned dresses, and characters drawn with rubbery expressiveness. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades across hundreds of newspapers, helping cement the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that newspaper syndicates exported directly into the earliest comic book reprints of the 1930s, making strips like this one structural ancestors of the comic book form itself.