Bringing Up Father — buf370113

Bringing Up Father by George McManus (King Features Syndicate) follows Irish immigrant Jiggs, newly rich but hopelessly hen-pecked by his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This daily strip — dateline January 13, internal copyright glyph suggesting 1937 — runs four panels: Maggie harangues Jiggs through a cascade of remembered humiliations (a rowing mishap, a childhood singing fantasy, a family portrait), culminating in the punchline about Aunt Matilda's biscuits and Jiggs warming his feet in the oven. McManus's draftsmanship is Art Nouveau–inflected, all flowing lines and elaborately hatched gowns. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips syndicated globally, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly shaping the anthology comic books of the 1930s that simply reprinted newspaper strips wholesale.