Bringing Up Father — buf370304

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, through a cascade of domestic financial demands. He settles into his armchair for a quiet smoke; his wife Maggie arrives with creditors at the door — grocer, baker, butcher, plumber — then their daughter adds a dressmaker's bill and a C.O.D. package; Jiggs's silent final panel, punctuated only by exclamation marks, says everything. McManus's draftsmanship is instantly recognizable: Art Nouveau curlicues, ink-wash cross-hatching, and exaggeratedly coiffed figures. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades and was among the strips that established the daily four-panel gag sequence as a commercial and narrative standard, its speech-balloon syntax directly feeding the anthology reprint comics that became America's first true comic books.