Bringing Up Father — buf401003

Three panels in George McManus's Bringing Up Father, the long-running daily strip (launched 1913) following Irish immigrant-made-good Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here Maggie tells a visitor her father is coming to stay and that Jiggs has been fixing up a room; a silhouetted figure peeks through a doorway; then 'EEK!'—the room is a chaos of lumber and debris. McManus's ligne claire linework, his art-nouveau-inflected interiors, and his disciplined three-panel gag architecture exemplify the daily newspaper strip as the direct ancestor of the comic book—syndicated pages whose panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast gave cartoonists the visual grammar that anthology comics would codify and sell from 1933 onward.