Bringing Up Father — buf400731

Three panels follow Maggie mid-tirade: a man has apparently compared her looks to someone named Margie, and she is furious. In the first panel her husband pleads for calm; in the second she recounts the insult in a spray of indignant speech-balloon text; in the third she seizes the telephone and rings the police station — only to blunder into the same unflattering comparison again, leaving her husband slack-jawed with a simple "Now what?" George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean brush line, expressive silhouettes, and tightly timed three-panel rhythm influenced a generation of cartoonists. Newspaper strips like this one — syndicated coast to coast — provided the page-layout conventions and recurring-character formula that proto-comic books would directly inherit.