Bringing Up Father — buf370719

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's eternally hen-pecked Irish-American social climber, trying to steal a nap in the library. He instructs a servant to tell James he's there; the next panel shows him snoring in an armchair, ZZZs cascading upward. A maid then relays the message through a comic chain of telephone-game repetition, until Maggie storms in furious that he was woken at all. McManus's draftsmanship is among the most elegant in daily comics — fluid Art Nouveau linework, patterned fabrics, and expressive silhouettes. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, its speech-balloon choreography and recurring cast helping codify the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates carried directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.