Bringing Up Father — buf370505

Four daily panels follow Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie through a London fog sequence. Panel one shows Maggie boasting about the city's royalty and cultured people while Jiggs, in his trademark top hat and checkered suit, suggests he find work as a cook. As darkness descends in panel two, the fog thickens until figures dissolve into silhouettes. Jiggs wishes his brother Jerry could see the fog—then notes, drily, that Jerry has spent most of his life in jail. The final panel is pure black: two white eyes floating in void, Maggie's voice calling for Jiggs. George McManus, who drew the strip from 1913 until his death in 1954, pioneered the recurring working-class immigrant character whose social-climbing domestic life played out in the daily newspaper strips that directly seeded the first comic books of the late 1930s.