Bringing Up Father — buf391204

Four panels follow Maggie mid-telephone monologue — rattling off Cleveland sights (the Terminal, the Art Museum, Lakeshore Boulevard) — while Jiggs, dressed to go out, drifts into sleep on the sofa, a question mark and two Z's floating above him. McManus draws the strip in his signature art-nouveau line: sinuous curves, patterned wallpaper, elegantly dressed figures whose body language carries the joke. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 under George McManus for King Features and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie among the most internationally syndicated characters in newspaper history. These daily strips — reprinted in pamphlet form as early as the 1910s — are the direct ancestors of the comic book, proving that recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons could sustain a mass readership across years.