Bringing Up Father — buf370204

Three panels of George McManus's long-running daily strip follow Jiggs in nostalgic monologue: childhood stickball in the alley (a birdcage for a catcher's mask, improvised bat), a crowded street parade of elaborately dressed socialites that dwarfs him, and a frigid tenement morning where kids broke ice in the washbasin. McManus's draftsmanship is elaborate — crosshatched crowds, ornate hats, confident brushwork — yet Jiggs remains the everyman. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* pioneered the recurring domestic-comedy strip, its continuity of character and panel-to-panel visual grammar directly shaping the anthology comic books that reprinted newspaper dailies through the 1930s. McManus's fluid line influenced a generation of cartoonists who carried that newspaper syntax into the nascent comic-book industry.