Bringing Up Father — buf370306

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveaux-riche Irish-American social climber, as a friend urges him to assert himself at home. Jiggs resolves to confront his domineering wife Maggie — then loses his nerve the instant he walks through the door, asking meekly what's in the newspaper. The final panel reveals that their neighbor Mrs. Mulligan has already hospitalized *her* husband for talking back. Punchline delivered, authority restored. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean ligne-claire figures, expressive speech balloons, and tight four-panel escalation became a template other cartoonists copied wholesale. The King Features daily strip — syndicated to hundreds of papers — fed directly into the reprint anthology comics of the 1930s that became the first comic books.