Bringing Up Father — buf420412f

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman who longs for corned beef and the old neighborhood, and his social-climbing wife Maggie. This Sunday page turns on a single engine: Jiggs is starving, the cook is off, Maggie won't cook, and he eventually sneaks out — only to fall asleep and dream of a desert, waking to find Maggie waiting with the dishes. McManus drew in a sinuous Art Nouveau line, his interiors dense with decorative detail, his figures rubbery and expressive. Launched in 1913 in the New York American, the strip ran for decades and was syndicated worldwide — proof that the recurring-character newspaper page, with its locked panel grid and speech balloons, directly seeded what became the comic book format.