Bringing Up Father — buf421108f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page turns on a single prop: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant-made-good, leaves his talking parrot Apollo with the family while he travels. Apollo promptly repeats the household's insults, embarrasses a stockbroker caller, and ends the strip singing in a gilded cage — the final panel a perfect McManus visual pun. McManus drew in a florid Art Nouveau line, filling rooms with ornate wallpaper and statuesque wives. His panel-to-panel gag escalation and use of speech balloons to carry the entire comedic load exemplify the visual grammar newspaper strips invented and comic books later inherited wholesale.