Bringing Up Father — buf400813

Four panels on a beach: Jiggs, the square-jawed Irish-American social climber in top hat and tails, spots a slender woman in a swimsuit walking past a breakwater post, does a double-take in the second panel, lurches toward her in the third—only to discover in the fourth that she is elderly and broadly costumed. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for over four decades. McManus's draftsmanship—sinuous Art Nouveau line, boldly spotted blacks, architectural confidence in figure placement—set a visual standard that syndicated strips carried into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s. Those reprint anthologies, assembled from newspaper pages exactly like this one, are the direct ancestors of the modern comic book format.