Bringing Up Father — buf401218

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, making it one of the longest-running and most internationally syndicated strips in newspaper history. This daily strip — four panels, black ink, McManus's characteristically elegant Art Nouveau linework — follows the eternal domestic war between the nouveau-riche Maggie and her hapless husband Jiggs. Here Maggie delivers a broadside on male selfishness; distracted by a newspaper bargain sale advertisement, she abandons the argument mid-sentence; the final panel erupts into a chaotic department-store scrum at the bargain counter. McManus's visual comedy is physical and precise: silhouette in panel three, pure crowd mayhem in panel four. Strips like this one — syndicated daily and Sunday pages from the 1910s onward — were literally cut, bound, and sold as the first comic books, establishing recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel grammar as the medium's foundation.