Bringing Up Father — buf400720

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the eternal domestic war between social-climbing Maggie and her hapless husband Jiggs. In this four-panel daily, Maggie orders Jiggs to paint a room; he mutters that being married is all he does; she retorts that if he thinks he can paint without ruining her clothes he'd better reconsider — and the punchline lands as Jiggs, having sat on a wet paintbrush, leaps up in starburst pain. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: fluid Art Nouveau flourishes, bold brushwork, and precisely staged physical comedy. Launched in 1913, the strip ran into the 1950s and was syndicated worldwide. Newspaper comic strips like this one — their recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — directly generated the page architecture that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and then imitated.