Bringing Up Father — buf391220

Three daily panels follow Jiggs — the flat-capped, newly-rich Irishman — and his imperious wife Maggie through what appears to be a Youngstown library visit. The gag turns on Jiggs mistaking a remark about Dickens and Shakespeare for talk about food: "What are you talking about? I haven't had a bite to eat since lunch." George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework — decorative wallpaper, elegant costuming, precise balloon placement — helped standardize the visual grammar that newspaper comic strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s. Speech balloons, sequential panel rhythm, and recurring character types: Jiggs and Maggie codified them all.