Bringing Up Father — buf411116f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs and Maggie through a full Sunday page built around a single running gag: an illegible letter arrives, baffles everyone — Maggie mistakes it for Egyptian hieroglyphics, a scholar invokes King Tut — until the final row reveals their college-age child wrote it. McManus draws in a rounded, art-deco line: ornate parlor furniture, women with elaborate coiffures, Jiggs in his perpetual tuxedo. Speech balloons cascade panel to panel with overlapping guesses, a pure example of the Sunday-page format perfecting its own visual grammar. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips syndicated internationally and directly influenced the anthology reprints that became the American comic book format.