Bringing Up Father — buf400902

Four panels, left to right: Jiggs — top hat, cigar, checked trousers — sits at a telephone desk as a visitor begins speaking. Time-caption cards mark the passage of ten minutes, one hour, two hours, each panel showing a large question mark balloon above the visitor while Jiggs stays glued to the receiver. Final panel: the visitor politely interrupts; Jiggs snaps, "Shut up — I'm talkin' to me wife." George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and its disciplined panel rhythm, expressive question-mark balloons, and recurring cast directly shaped the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages exported into the first bound comic books of the 1930s and '40s — proving that the comic book did not invent sequential art; it inherited it.