Bringing Up Father — buf430110f

Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American social climber in top hat and tails, smuggles the household's antique Louis XVI clock to his servant Finninigan to pawn for pocket money — not knowing his wife Maggie has hidden hundreds of dollars inside it. Twelve panels of broad slapstick follow: Maggie's shrieking discovery, a reward notice, a frantic search, and a punchline in which Finninigan, unable to hock the clock, has taken a job advertising "Dapper Wrapper Cigars" and is smoking his wages. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, drawing from his own family's immigrant-made-good anxieties. His sinuous Art Nouveau linework and precisely choreographed balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar that American newspaper comics — and by direct descent, the comic book — inherited wholesale.