Bringing Up Father — buf400320

Four panels follow a stout, top-hatted Jiggs and his wife Maggie on a social-climbing errand to Senator De Bate's Capitol office. The gag turns on a single repeated phrase: the senator 'is not in,' his aide 'is not in,' and finally the whole office staff — a row of startled functionaries — 'are not in,' punctuated by a wordless question mark. McManus draws with fluid Art Nouveau curves: ruffled collars, checkered suits, exaggerated jowls. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the first strips to sustain a recurring cast across decades, proving that newspaper comics — distributed by syndicates to hundreds of papers simultaneously — were the true incubator of sequential visual storytelling long before the comic book format existed as a separate object.