Bringing Up Father — buf371201

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he hides from an imperious female caller, lets the maid handle her, then surfaces once she has gone — only to turn his attention to pitching what appears to be a newfangled phonograph or radio cabinet to a buyer. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: confident brush lines, Art Nouveau curves on the women's figures, and precisely lettered speech balloons that carry the whole comic rhythm. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for decades and helped standardize the daily comic strip's sequential grammar — fixed recurring characters, consistent panel grids, gag-per-strip pacing — that proto-comic-book anthologists would soon package as the medium's first collected pamphlets.