Bringing Up Father — buf400826

Three panels follow the domestic friction familiar to readers of George McManus's long-running strip: Maggie complains about the new cook's social life while Jiggs stands sheepish in the doorway; a polka-dotted young woman at a telephone table fields a beach invitation; then Maggie delivers the punchline — she caught the cook sneaking out with the icebox. McManus's line work is fluid and decorative, his women dressed in fashionable curls and patterns, his men caught perpetually off-balance. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, its speech balloons and sequential panels part of the visual grammar newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.