Bringing Up Father — buf401118

Three panels by George McManus track Maggie's daughter warning her mother about an unvetted property purchase, Maggie's breezy confidence in 'Mister Lotsaland,' and the punchline reveal: the real-estate men have spent ten years trying to unload that very lot — and complimented Mrs. Jiggs to close the sale. McManus's crosshatched Art Deco interiors, extravagant hats, and rubber-limbed figures are instantly recognizable. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first comic strips syndicated globally, its recurring cast and sequential speech balloons helping fix conventions that migrated directly into the comic book format of the late 1930s. McManus, trained in vaudeville poster art, gave the strip a theatrical staging — characters address one another across panel gutters — that influenced every cartoonist who followed.