Bringing Up Father — buf411116f

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs and Maggie through a full Sunday page built around a single running gag: an illegible letter arrives, baffles everyone — Maggie mistakes it for Egyptian hieroglyphics, a scholar invokes King Tut — until the final row reveals their college-age child wrote it. McManus draws in a rounded, art-deco line: ornate parlor furniture, women with elaborate coiffures, Jiggs in his perpetual tuxedo. Speech balloons cascade panel to panel with overlapping guesses, a pure example of the Sunday-page format perfecting its own visual grammar. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the first strips syndicated internationally and directly influenced the anthology reprints that became the American comic book format.