Bringing Up Father — buf390401

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic squabble involving a sewer pipe, a sleeping brother-in-law, and a punchline built on the word idle. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and by 1939 its ink-brush draftsmanship — sinuous Art Nouveau linework, expressive silhouettes, tightly packed speech balloons — had influenced a generation. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: King Features' syndication model proved recurring characters and sequential panels could sustain mass audiences, and the physical reprinting of such dailies into pamphlet form produced the first true comic books in the early 1930s. McManus's visual grammar, panel rhythm, and character-driven gag structure remain foundational.