Bringing Up Father — buf390518

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant bricklayer turned nouveau-riche husband, perpetually henpecked by his social-climbing wife Maggie. This four-panel daily strip opens with two women cooing over a baby's resemblance to "Daddy," then cuts to Jiggs attempting baby talk — "Skaw-bau" and "Goo" — before a phone call from "Mr. Dinty Moore" lets him escape. McManus's line work is fluid and assured, his characters rendered with exaggerated but consistent anatomy. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades in syndication, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar helping standardize conventions that comic-book publishers would soon lift wholesale — speech balloons, visual shorthand for emotion, and the cliffhanger panel break.