Bringing Up Father — buf401025

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip follows the familiar domestic triangle: the newly wealthy Irish-American Jiggs, his imperious wife Maggie, and the social chaos between them. Four panels trace a single gag — a horse delivered to Jiggs's hapless brother, who doesn't know his own strength — from Jiggs's breezy reassurance through Maggie's theatrical alarm to the punchline report that the brother is *carrying* the horse under his arm. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his figures exaggerated but controlled. Strips like this one are foundational documents: the syndicated newspaper page invented recurring characters, sequential panels, and the speech balloon grammar that comic books inherited wholesale after 1938.