Bringing Up Father — buf401207

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish-American, perpetually at war with domestic life. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs tries to read his newspaper in peace; when his family won't stop talking, he thunders "Don't interrupt" — and promptly gets a frying pan to the skull, landing him star-dazed on the floor with the rueful admission, "I guess I shouldn't have talked myself." McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: rounded Art Nouveau linework, precise crosshatching, expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, the strip ran over forty years and was among the first American comics translated worldwide. Sunday newspaper strips like this one — with their recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons — directly supplied the page format and visual grammar that early comic book publishers simply reprinted and then imitated.