Bringing Up Father — buf400627

Four panels follow Jiggs — the social-climbing Irish-American parvenu — and his formidable wife Maggie as he schemes to hide a newspaper announcing an opera season, fearing she'll drag him out before their daughter arrives. Maggie, characteristically, is already one step ahead, inviting the hotel manager to dinner and announcing they'll all attend the opera. The final panel shows Jiggs slack-jawed with a question mark balloon — George McManus's shorthand for comic defeat. McManus drew Bringing Up Father from 1913 until his death in 1954, pioneering the recurring-cast domestic strip. His sinuous Art Nouveau linework, cross-hatched suits, and expressive speech balloons directly shaped the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages exported into the first comic books of the 1930s.