Bringing Up Father — buf401122

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the eternal domestic war between nouveau-riche Jiggs and his imperious wife Maggie: here, Jiggs has bought unseen property sight-unseen, and the gag builds panel by panel as the men arrive to find the "hundred-foot boulevard" is underwater, a diver's helmet the punchline. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework — fluid figures, precise crosshatching, expressive silhouettes — was among the visual templates that taught cartoonists worldwide how panels sequence action and speech balloons carry voice. The newspaper strip page *is* the comic book's direct ancestor; King Features syndicating strips like this one seeded the reprint anthologies that became the first true comic books in the early 1930s.