Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American social climber, as he arrives at a formal party lugging a saxophone case. His hostess, unmoved, redirects him to entertain the guests; Jiggs produces the instrument only to reveal it doubles as a corn-cob pipe holder — to the crowd's collective wince. George McManus's line work is clean and fluid, his figures broad-shouldered and rubber-limbed, his speech balloons integrated naturally into each panel's architecture. Launched in 1913 in the *New York American*, *Bringing Up Father* ran for over eight decades, syndicated worldwide. McManus refined the daily-strip grammar — consistent recurring cast, compressed four-panel joke structure, expressive crowd reaction — that newspaper comics exported directly into the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.