Bringing Up Father — buf391014

Six panels follow Jiggs — the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche everyman created by George McManus — into a camp of Ute Indians where, characteristically, he is less in peril than in an argument, trying to decline purchasing a rug. McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship is on full display: crisp ink contours, cross-hatched rocky terrain, elaborate feathered costuming rendered with the same decorative precision he brought to interiors and evening wear. Speech balloons cascade left to right across two joined scenes, a pacing technique McManus helped standardize. Bringing Up Father, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips reprinted in bound comic collections — those cheap tabloid reprints of the 1930s that directly preceded the purpose-built comic book — making McManus an unwitting architect of an entire medium.