Bringing Up Father — buf390506

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checkered vest, through a comic humiliation: his wife Maggie has placed a baby photo of their son on his office desk; colleagues at the office erupt in laughter imagining what the child will look like grown up; Jiggs retreats muttering "fine bunch of guys they are." George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, running it for decades across hundreds of newspapers worldwide. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework—bold outlines, decorative wallpaper patterns, expressive crowd staging—helped standardize the daily comic strip's visual language: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast whose domestic tensions readers tracked like serialized fiction. These syndicated strips are the direct ancestors of the comic book format.