Bringing Up Father — buf401121

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, its three-panel daily format already a template for the medium. This strip follows Jiggs and his wife as they arrive by car at a rural property she has purchased — the real-estate agent promises quiet, no traffic, no city noise — only for a freight train to rumble directly past the house. McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: crosshatched foliage, a finely rendered caboose, and expressive balloon lettering that choreographs the joke across panels with surgical timing. Sunday newspaper strips like this one *are* the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — that every subsequent cartoonist inherited.