Bringing Up Father — buf400916

Four panels by George McManus follow Jiggs escaping to a boat — "the one place that Maggie can't nag me" — only to have a crewman propose flying the owner's flag to signal he isn't aboard. Jiggs, already overboard and swimming frantically, asks to be thrown a life-preserver; the captain, hearing the flag suggestion, simply says "WHAT?" McManus's brushwork is confident and fluid: nautical cross-hatching, expressive rubber-limbed figures, speech balloons that breathe. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for nearly nine decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean panel-to-panel continuity and character-driven comedy directly shaped the visual storytelling conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported wholesale into the first comic books of the late 1930s.