Bringing Up Father — buf361223

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a newly wealthy Irish-American bricklayer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This four-panel daily — dateline 12-23, copyright line 1936, King Features Syndicate — shows Jiggs nostalgically recounting old neighborhood Saturday nights: off-key street singing, a dog catcher undone by a portrait of 'Uncle Saddleface,' a brother arriving in a loud checked suit, and a nephew whose prison stripes were tailored by the state. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident, his crowd scenes kinetic, his architectural spot-blacks theatrical. Launched in 1913, the strip ran until 1954, making it one of the longest-lived continuity gag strips in syndication and a direct formal ancestor of the comic-book page: its recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons were part of the visual grammar American comics exported worldwide.