Bringing Up Father — buf400425

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's perennial Irish-American social climber in top hat and checkered suit, as he walks a lonely city street, spots a sign for Jim's Restaurant advertising corned beef and cabbage at First and Front Streets, interrogates a beat cop for directions, and finally admits he's ditching his wife Maggie not to escort her but to eat his beloved working-class staple himself. McManus's linework is sinuous Art Nouveau elegance pressed into comic-strip dailies — a style he developed from 1913 onward that influenced generations of cartoonists. Bringing Up Father ran in syndication for over 87 years, exemplifying how newspaper comic pages, with their recurring characters and sequential panel grammar, directly seeded the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.