Bringing Up Father — buf401209

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and it ran for decades as one of the most widely syndicated strips in American newspaper history. This daily strip opens with Maggie dispatching their daughter to thank Uncle Jiggs for paying school fees and piano lessons; three brisk panels of domestic dialogue give way to a silhouetted doorbell scene, then a punchline panel where Jiggs — caught doing something he shouldn't — sits wide-eyed beside a large question mark. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: lush Art Nouveau lamp, confident ink silhouettes, expressive faces. The newspaper comic strip page is where the medium's core grammar was invented — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — and syndicates like King Features carried that grammar into millions of American homes every morning.