Bringing Up Father — buf321204

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and by the 1930s its Sunday page had settled into a reliable domestic comedy: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche, forever scheming to escape his imperious wife Maggie for a card game and a corned beef. This page runs the full circuit — Jiggs talks his way out the door, Maggie sets him digging the yard, he tunnels under the wall and negotiates cab fare from a neighbor with a hat as collateral. McManus's line is among the most elegant in newspaper cartooning: Art Nouveau curves, crosshatched shadows, silhouetted figures rendered in confident ink. Sunday pages like this one, syndicated nationally by King Features, established the page-layout conventions — timed gag panels, expressive speech balloons, serialized character — that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and repackaged.