Bringing Up Father — buf401113

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a newly wealthy Irish-American, perpetually caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own fondness for corned beef and old friends. In this three-panel daily strip, Jiggs walks to his new office at Maggie's insistence, alarming passersby who mistake his top-hat-and-tails get-up for a burglar; a cop's exclamation point says everything. The final panel finds him caught arriving home at dawn — 'just getting home?' — the night-club roué unmasked. McManus's draftsmanship is exceptionally elegant: architectural crosshatching, fluid figures, and balloon placement that drives timing like stage comedy. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades, its recurring-character formula and panel-by-panel visual grammar directly seeding the anthology comic books that followed newspaper pages into American hands.