Bringing Up Father — buf400331

George McManus's Bringing Up Father ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. These Sunday pages follow Jiggs and Maggie on a sightseeing tour of Boston — Bunker Hill, Old Ironsides, the Old North Church, Faneuil Hall — each landmark foiled by a cop, a window-washer, or a broken-down car. McManus drew in a bold, art-deco line with lavish color and geometric backgrounds, his characters rubbery but precise. The strip's recurring gag engine — social-climbing wife, earthier husband — drove decades of daily and Sunday pages. Those pages, syndicated nationally and collected in reprint pamphlets as early as the 1910s, are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons, cliffhangers resolved across installments.