Bringing Up Father — buf400522

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, eavesdropping as his formidable wife Maggie holds a telephone conversation he cannot penetrate — her side rendered entirely as 'Uh-huh, uh-huh.' When she finally explains she has been invited to meet her sister Lucy's friend, Jiggs mutters he didn't know Lucy had any friends. The gag closes with him unable to get a word in edgewise, his spiky hair bristling in exasperation. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His clean Art Nouveau linework — sinuous dress patterns, elegantly sparse backgrounds — gave American newspaper comics a graphic sophistication that directly shaped the visual grammar: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and recurring domestic characters that Sunday syndicates exported worldwide.