Bringing Up Father — buf390121

Six panels track Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, slumped asleep in an armchair while his formidable wife Maggie monopolizes the telephone for three hours. Maggie gossips effusively, waves off callers at the door — the baker, the grocery man — and snaps at Jiggs not to interrupt. The final panel returns to Jiggs, still snoring, two hours later. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and its clean brushwork, spotted blacks, and precisely lettered speech balloons became a template for the daily newspaper strip. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau interiors and expressive figure drawing influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated dailies, collected and reprinted, were the direct commercial ancestor of the comic book format.