Bringing Up Father — buf400505

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows the eternal collision between newly rich Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie. These Sunday pages trace a single holiday arc: Jiggs's flashy necktie provokes office ridicule before the couple decamps to Atlantic City, where a crowded boardwalk beach scene — rendered in McManus's signature Art Nouveau linework, sinuous and dense with pattern — overwhelms the page. The strip resolves with Jiggs vanishing into an outsize novelty bathing suit, punctuated by a sight-gag question mark. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the earliest strips to use recurring cast, sequential panel rhythm, and integrated speech balloons as a stable visual system — the direct formal ancestor of the comic book page.