Bringing Up Father — buf401108

Four panels, black ink, crosshatched settings: Maggie urges Jiggs to go into business with a Mr. Bob Upendown; Jiggs, in his trademark top hat, strolls to Upendown's office puffing a cigar; a receptionist turns him away; the final panel reveals Upendown already entertaining visitors. George McManus's line is clean and confident — rounded figures, drop-shadow lettering in speech balloons, brisk left-to-right panel flow. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus refined the visual grammar that newspaper comic pages had pioneered since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s — the grammar that anthology reprint booklets of the 1930s would package into what we now call the comic book.