Bringing Up Father — buf430829f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie through a single farcical Sunday page built entirely on escalating dinner invitations. Panel by panel, Maggie cancels one engagement for a better cut of meat — country sausage yielding to pot roast, roast beef to porterhouse steak — while Jiggs lurks, bemused. McManus's line is fluent and decorative, his women drawn in fashionable silhouette, his interiors lushly crosshatched. Launched in 1913, the strip ran over forty years and helped establish the recurring-cast domestic comedy as a newspaper staple. Its disciplined panel grid and expressive speech balloons are precisely the visual syntax that printer Max Gaines would soon fold, staple, and sell as the first comic books.