Bringing Up Father — buf390722

Six horizontal panels show a formal dinner party in full swing. A nobleman flatters a curly-haired young woman while her beau—slack-jawed and gap-toothed—mumbles "Goof-goof-gaw" beside her. Parents beam on both sides; a servant at far right confesses the chef drank all the wine. George McManus's strip, launched in 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie through decades of domestic comedy. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: Art Nouveau flourishes on chandeliers and wallpaper, ink-confident figures, and speech balloons that crowd every panel with overlapping boast and blunder. Bringing Up Father ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and belongs to the founding generation of newspaper comics—the syndicated daily and Sunday pages whose panel-and-balloon grammar directly seeded the first collected comic books of the 1930s.