Bringing Up Father — buf370731

Four panels track a domestic crisis: the wife dispatches her husband to fire the new butler for cooking corned beef and cabbage in the kitchen, but the husband — charmed when the butler greets him warmly on the stairs — decides he cannot go through with it. In the kitchen he asks about the dish; the butler admits he burned it. Fired. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, following social-climbing Maggie and her reluctant husband Jiggs through endless class-warfare skirmishes. McManus's clean, art-nouveau-inflected line, his confident use of staircase staging, and his tightly timed four-panel rhythm helped standardize the daily strip format that comic-book publishers would soon reprint and repackage, directly seeding the American comic book as a commercial object.