Bringing Up Father — buf330625

George McManus's Bringing Up Father follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American laborer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This Sunday page opens with the couple rushing to a musicale when Jiggs's top hat sails over a fence into a quarry — twelve panels of escalating slapstick follow as he is lowered by rope into the pit, greeted by construction workers, and left stranded while Maggie fumes above. McManus drew with an art-nouveau fluency rare in newspaper comics: clean ruled panels, expressive balloon lettering, and figures built on confident ink outlines. Launched in 1913 and syndicated by King Features, the strip ran for decades, its domestic comedy format directly shaping the anthology reprints — collected funny pages sold as cheap booklets — that became the first true comic books.