Bringing Up Father — buf370322

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running and most widely syndicated strips in American newspaper history. This daily four-panel strip follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs — a newly wealthy Irish-American laborer — and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here, Jiggs tries to slip downtown for a passport; Maggie outmaneuvers him at the passport office when the clerk demands a birth certificate revealing her age; her own mother then calls to concede defeat. McManus's flowing Art Nouveau linework, his stagey panel compositions, and his speech balloons anchored to expressive gesture helped fix the visual grammar that early comic book publishers would simply repackage from 1933 onward.