Bringing Up Father — buf401226

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the familiar domestic engine: Maggie dispatches husband Jiggs upstairs with an avalanche of errand instructions — nail file, lipstick, sewing box, datebook, compact, pocketbook, comb, mirror, hairpins — delivered across two panels in escalating run-on speech balloons. Jiggs trudges up the grand staircase, reaches the dresser, and simply hands the whole drawer to Maggie. McManus's cross-hatched ligne-claire draftsmanship, his elegant interiors, and his mastery of comic timing through panel pacing were foundational to the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide — grammar that anthology reprints would soon transform into the comic book format itself.