Bringing Up Father — buf370311

Four panels follow Jiggs—George McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber—through an upper-crust receiving line, then a shadowy doorway confrontation with a hulking figure, and finally a room hung with portrait paintings. The strip's spoken gags turn on class anxiety: Jiggs's blunt commentary on the fancy guests gives way to his bewilderment at painted kings, jacks, and queens. McManus's line work is supremely confident—exaggerated silhouettes, rococo wallpaper, women drawn with ribbon-thin waists—reflecting his years absorbing Art Nouveau. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for nearly a century and helped standardize the daily strip's sequential panel grammar, recurring cast, and speech-balloon conventions that American comic books directly inherited when anthology publishers began reprinting newspaper pages in the early 1930s.