Bringing Up Father — buf400712

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This strip opens mid-domestic crisis: Jiggs's wife fumes about relatives who nearly stripped their house bare while the couple was away; across four tight panels, a phone call reveals the culprit — Maggie's brother's aunt — and a dinner obligation Jiggs cannot escape. McManus's draftsmanship is among the most polished in newspaper cartooning: Art Nouveau curlicues frame scenes, figures are crisply crosshatched, and speech balloons flow naturally through the panel grid. Strips like this one *are* the direct ancestor of the comic book — the panel-by-panel grammar, recurring cast, and weekly rhythm that publishers simply repackaged as pamphlets from the 1930s onward.