Bringing Up Father — buf370310

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American parvenu, as his wife Maggie adopts a monocle and swagger stick in pursuit of an English accent. Jiggs wanders in baffled; Maggie sweeps past with an imperious 'What-ho!'; a servant mistakes the household theatrics for a masquerade ball; Maggie then dispatches him to announce four-o'clock tea — and sends him flying. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, his sinuous Art Nouveau linework and stagey panel compositions making it one of the most widely syndicated strips on earth. Daily newspaper comics like this one — continuous characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — supplied the direct template from which the comic-book format was assembled in the late 1930s.