Bringing Up Father — buf390116

Five panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American bricklayer turned millionaire, as his wife Maggie hides his evening clothes to prevent him attending a chowder party. Undeterred, Jiggs rings for a servant, borrows a bathrobe, and threatens his wife with a black eye — the strip's signature domestic-combat gag delivered in compressed, punchy dialogue balloons. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau linework — ornate interiors, precise crosshatching, fluid figure drawing — distinguished him from rougher contemporaries. The strip's daily and Sunday pages, syndicated globally, exemplify the newspaper comic as the direct ancestor of the comic book: recurring characters, sequential panel logic, and speech balloons refined into a mature visual language.