Bringing Up Father — buf400629

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs — vest, spiky hair, perpetual exasperation — dragging luggage home from a long trip, fantasizing aloud across three panels about sitting still for six months. His wife Maggie enters the fourth with a travel list: they're going out again immediately. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident; his speech balloons integrate naturally into composed panels. Strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: when publishers reprinted newspaper pages as pamphlets in the early 1930s, they inadvertently invented a new medium. The panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast — McManus and his contemporaries built that entire visual grammar from scratch.