Bringing Up Father — buf370209

Four panels of George McManus's Bringing Up Father, syndicated daily strip begun in 1913 and still running into the 1950s. Here McManus strings together nostalgic vignettes: a girl declaiming Romeo on a stage, a horse bolting with a buggy, children ambushing their father in the rain, and a mother delivering a bowl-cut haircut. The strip's signature Art Nouveau linework — decorative wallpaper, fluid silhouettes, precise crosshatching — appears in every panel. McManus's Jiggs-and-Maggie saga helped standardize the four-panel daily format and the integrated speech balloon. Alongside The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo, Bringing Up Father is foundational hardware in the visual grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale from the newspaper page.