Bringing Up Father — buf370116

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie's monologue of nostalgic grievances: a boy buried in attic clutter, the rotund Jiggs lounging in kitchen contentment with fan and bucket, children envying a classmate whose mumps excuse him from school, and Jiggs's Uncle Binny ensconced at his railroad flagman post. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, making it one of the longest-running American strips. His linework — confident brush outlines, patterned fabrics rendered in crosshatch, expressive balloon placement — helped codify the visual language that daily newspaper strips passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s: the panel grid, the recurring cast, the gag-per-beat rhythm that readers learned to scan left to right without instruction.