Bringing Up Father — buf400730

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber created by George McManus in 1913, as he schemes to keep Maggie's brother Danny from settling in for the day. In the first panel Jiggs receives the unwelcome news; in the second, Maggie gone, he hatches a plan using leftover wet-paint signs from the painters; in the third, Danny finds every surface — sofa, mantle, chairs — plastered with warnings and retreats. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: art-nouveau flourishes on furniture, impeccably cross-hatched tuxedos, and speech balloons whose letterforms carry comic timing. Bringing Up Father ran from 1913 to 2000, syndicated globally, and its Sunday pages exemplify exactly how Hearst-era newspaper comics invented the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated balloon-and-image storytelling — that comic books would later inherit wholesale.