Bringing Up Father — buf370225

Bringing Up Father by George McManus (King Features Syndicate). Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the newly wealthy Irish immigrant, as his daughter urges him to phone society matron Mrs. Polly Parrot; he obliges, only to arrive and find the Parrots wallowing in their own social anxieties. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately distinctive: crosshatched suits, curlicued furniture, and elegantly dressed women rendered with an Art Nouveau fluency rare in newspaper comics. Launched in 1913, the strip ran continuously for decades, making it one of the longest-lived character comedies in syndication history. Daily strips like this one — reprinted in early comic-book anthologies — taught readers worldwide to parse sequential panels and speech balloons, the visual grammar that defines the medium.