Bringing Up Father — buf400228

Four panels follow a baby's babbling ('Da-Da-Da-Da-') through a telephone crisis: an exasperated father, pulled from a long-distance call, must say something sweet to the child — who promptly erupts into full-throated wailing ('Wa-a-a-a-a'). George McManus draws in his characteristic art-nouveau-inflected line: patterned wallpaper, expressive hair-standing-on-end, and speech balloons scaled to the volume of the noise inside them. Bringing Up Father, syndicated nationally from 1913, made Jiggs and Maggie household names across three decades of daily strips and Sunday pages. Those newspaper pages — not comic books — invented the medium's grammar: the gutter between panels, the recurring cast, the balloon as voice. McManus was among the handful of artists who turned that grammar into something visually sophisticated and commercially enduring.