Bringing Up Father — buf430221f

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irishman forever caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his fondness for corned beef and the old neighborhood. This Sunday page turns on a winter gag: Maggie guilt-trips Jiggs about her brother freezing on their farm, they rush out to rescue him — only to find he has burned the entire house down for warmth, sitting contentedly in the open-air skeleton, asking someone to close a window. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: sinuous Art Nouveau ornament, immaculate brushwork, expressive silhouette. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and helped establish the recurring-character Sunday page as a commercial and artistic institution — panel borders, sequential storytelling, and speech balloons refined into a grammar every subsequent comic artist inherited.