Bringing Up Father — buf400224

George McManus's Bringing Up Father ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This daily shows Jiggs and companions aboard a Mississippi riverboat approaching Memphis, surrounded by floating song titles — My Old Kentucky Home, I Wish I Was in Dixie, California Here I Come — as a paddlesteamer churns past. McManus's art is elegantly Art Deco: clean ruled panels, confident brushwork, figures in top hats rendered with a cartoonist's economy. The strip belongs to the generation of Sunday pages and dailies — Outcault, Dirks, McCay, McManus — whose artists invented the visual grammar of sequential cartooning: the speech balloon, the recurring cast, the panel grid that would directly seed the comic book format of the 1930s.