Bringing Up Father — buf420712f

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Jiggs and Maggie, the nouveau-riche Irish-American couple whose marriage is a perpetual class-war comedy: Maggie aspires upward; Jiggs resists. Here, a year-neglected country estate provides the punchline — shrubs planted around the garage have grown into towering trees, consuming the car and wrecking the property entirely. McManus's draftsmanship is unusually elegant for the gag strip form: Art Nouveau-influenced interiors, precise crosshatching, and expressive caricature. His confident panel compositions and economical balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar that newspaper Sunday pages exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.