Bringing Up Father — buf420118f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 until well past mid-century, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Jiggs — the social-climbing Irish immigrant made rich but not refined — as he tries to enjoy a quiet afternoon reading while a neighbor's small girl terrorizes the household with a drum. The strip's visual logic is characteristic McManus: elegant Art Nouveau interior furnishings, broad physical comedy, and speech balloons calibrated for timing. The child trades her drum for a five-dollar bill, only to rejoin a neighborhood band outside. McManus's mastery of recurring-character continuity and panel-to-panel rhythm directly shaped the vocabulary that early comic book editors imported wholesale from the Sunday pages.