Bringing Up Father — buf370813

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the domestic wars of Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually bullied by his imperious wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs fires a servant, Maggie immediately congratulates herself on the decision, then frets the doorbell will now ring unanswered — only for the fired man to reappear, politely returning his key and offering to be rehired in case she changes her mind. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, expressive silhouettes, and tightly coiled balloon placement carry the comic reversal with precision. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and exemplifies how newspaper dailies forged the visual grammar — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters — that directly seeded the American comic book.