Bringing Up Father — buf370604

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* (King Features, 1913–2000) follows nouveau-riche Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this daily, Maggie boasts to a neighbor that their son is up early and headed to the office — a sure sign of business genius. Jiggs, overhearing, grows cautiously optimistic. At the office, the boss discovers the son raided the cash drawer for fifty dollars, took his golf clubs, and absconded with the stenographer. The strip's gag snaps shut in the final panel with a richly crosshatched chaos of stars and flailing limbs. McManus's elegantly curved Art Nouveau linework — influenced by his admiration for Aubrey Beardsley — helped establish the daily comic strip as a distinct narrative art form, with panel-to-panel causality and character-driven comedy that directly prefigured the comic book format.