Bringing Up Father — buf400828

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber immortalized by George McManus, as he tries to placate his sharp-tempered wife Maggie by washing the dishes while she is out — only to smash them and flee to buy a one-way train ticket to anywhere. McManus's line work is elegant and confident: ornate lamp bases, patterned jackets, and expressive spiked hair rendered in crisp pen strokes. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest continuous strips in American newspaper history. Such daily and Sunday pages — syndicated to hundreds of papers — established the recurring-character strip as commercial art's dominant form and supplied the reprinted anthology pamphlets that became the first true comic books.