Bringing Up Father — buf400710

Four daily panels by George McManus show a domestic standoff: a stout, spiky-haired man argues with a woman in a floral dress over a borrowed sofa, then plots to reclaim it by waking the borrower with a secondhand alarm clock, itself borrowed from yet another brother. The gag spirals through a chain of debts, landing on an offer to sell the clock back for cash owed. McManus's line is confident and economical — solid blacks, hatched tone, expressive rubbery faces. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, starred Jiggs and Maggie and ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the most widely read cartoonists alive. These newspaper comic strips — their panels, speech balloons, and recurring cast — were the direct template from which the first comic books were assembled, largely by reprinting exactly such pages.