Bringing Up Father — buf430711f

Jiggs hunts the house for Maggie's hidden pocketbook — rifling cushions, checking the vase on the stairs, peering under the furnace — only to collapse on the lounge and discover he's been sitting on it. McManus draws his Sunday page in a lush Art Nouveau line: curved banisters, spotted dress, the telephone panel lit with crisp crosshatching. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly ninety years and shaped the visual grammar of comic strips worldwide — the recurring cast, the multi-tier Sunday layout, the speech balloon as dramatic pause. McManus's draftsmanship, absorbed from Winsor McCay, brought genuine elegance to domestic slapstick at the very moment newspaper pages were inventing what would become the comic book.