Bringing Up Father — buf370904

Four panels track Jiggs—the parvenu Irish-American husband in top hat and tails—as he slips away with a camera while wife Maggie and a society count are occupied, intending to study it at the office. The count then asks where the camera is; Maggie insists it was on the table a moment ago; Jiggs reappears at his desk baffled by a camera that isn't his. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: Art Deco interiors, expressive silhouettes, crisp balloon lettering. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the earliest strips to build sustained characters across years of daily continuity, helping establish the recurring-cast model that newspaper syndicates standardized and that early comic books—reprinting exactly such strips—packaged into the format readers would eventually call the comic book.