Bringing Up Father — buf420125f

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and by the 1940s its Sunday pages had settled into a confident, art-deco-inflected rhythm. This twelve-panel strip follows Jiggs — the nouveau-riche Irishman forever dodging his social-climbing wife Maggie — as he visits a businessman named Carl Reef, deflects questions about the war, fumbles through a restaurant lunch, and ends lost in a train station rotunda. McManus's line is clean and theatrical: ornate interiors, characters in top hats and evening dress, speech balloons nested precisely inside ruled borders. Sunday strips like this one are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book — recurring cast, sequential panels, standardized balloon lettering — the visual grammar that Outcault, Dirks, and McManus codified before comic books existed as a format.