Bringing Up Father — buf411130f

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making Jiggs and Maggie two of the longest-running characters in American comics. This Sunday page — dated 11-30 in the lower right, syndicated by King Features — unfolds in a loose reverie structure: rather than one continuous plot, a narrator (likely Jiggs) strings together family memory gags: Aunt Min's runaway rig, raucous nights at Dinty's tavern, a painted mustache coffee cup that causes a fainting, a borrowed bicycle, Cousin Joe's soapy breakfasts, a rocking-chair cat catastrophe. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — Art Nouveau flourishes on clothing and furniture, clean ink lines, expressive crowd scenes. His confident panel compositions and integrated speech balloons helped fix the visual grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.