Bringing Up Father — buf390524

Three panels follow the domestic comedy of Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, and his imperious wife Maggie. Here Maggie hands their baby grandchild a telephone receiver so "Grandpa" can talk to him; the toddler obliges with nonsense syllables — Ooh-de-doo-gaw-gaw — overheard by a bemused man at a bar, who summons a policeman convinced Jiggs has gone "dippy on th' phone." The cop's punchline: he saw Jiggs playing with a rat the day before. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His fluid Art Nouveau linework — curling hair, patterned wallpaper, expressive silhouettes — set a visual standard for domestic newspaper comics whose panel-and-balloon grammar fed directly into the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s.