Bringing Up Father — buf400430

George McManus's Bringing Up Father (1913–2000) follows nouveau-riche Irish-American Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here, four panels set in Dallas show Jiggs gamely donning a cowboy suit to blend with the locals; Maggie dismisses him flatly — "you don't look good in anything" — while bystanders in ten-gallon hats stare at his checked city suit, prompting the punchline: locals wonder where he came from. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — fluid ink line, densely populated crowd scenes, expressive rubber-faced characters. The strip pioneered the recurring cast and the domestic-comedy formula that shaped American comics. Sunday newspaper pages like this one were the direct commercial and formal ancestor of the comic book, establishing panel grids, speech balloons, and visual continuity storytelling as a mass-market art form.