Bringing Up Father — buf390818

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's long-running immigrant-rise-to-riches couple, through a domestic crisis: a wailing baby silenced only when Maggie begins to sing — her voice stopping the crying but driving the building's neighbors to the door to complain. McManus's line is elegant and fluid, his figures rounded and expressively caricatured, his backgrounds spare. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, making McManus one of the most widely read cartoonists alive. The strip's consistent cast, recurring settings, and interlocking speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that newspaper comic pages — Sunday color sections and black-and-white dailies alike — handed directly to the nascent comic book industry of the late 1930s.