Bringing Up Father — buf401021

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own fondness for old haunts. In this four-panel daily strip, Jiggs learns from a street acquaintance that Maggie has been taking a "nerve tonic" that makes her tough — and he's afraid to go home. Squaring up outside the door, he loses his nerve entirely and calls up to her window hat-in-hand. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: clean ink line, architectural backgrounds, and expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades across hundreds of papers, its recurring domestic conflict and balloon-and-panel syntax helping to codify the visual grammar that newspaper comics — the direct ancestor of the comic book — passed to every subsequent generation of sequential artists.