Bringing Up Father — buf400416

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman forever caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own simpler pleasures. In this four-panel daily, the family is in Oklahoma City: Jiggs, cigar in mouth and checkerboard suit, muses about sightseeing while Maggie and a companion make elaborate plans — hat shop, antique store, tea, auction, movie — until Jiggs slips off alone toward something across the street marked only with a question mark. McManus's clean brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and clockwork comic timing represent the daily newspaper strip at full maturity. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the features whose page layouts, recurring characters, and speech-balloon conventions directly shaped the format that early comic-book publishers would repackage and sell beginning in the mid-1930s.