Bringing Up Father — buf401001

Four panels show Jiggs spotting Maggie's cousin Larry driven past in a patrol wagon — a fact he bungles in stages: he saw the cousin, forgot to wave him in, then admits the man was under arrest. Maggie's reaction closes the strip with a wordless question mark. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American syndication. McManus refined the crosshatched Art Nouveau elegance he had absorbed from Winsor McCay, giving Jiggs's working-class world genuinely decorative linework. Strips like this one — daily and Sunday pages circulated by King Features — are the literal precursors of the comic book: the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast all codified here before the pamphlet format existed.