Bringing Up Father — buf370927

Four panels follow Jiggs, the gout-suffering Irish-American social climber, as his wife Maggie wheels him to the window to rest his foot — only for a woodpecker to land on it and hammer away, producing a volley of *TAT-TA-TAT* sound effects before Jiggs howls in pain. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in newspaper history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework — decorative wallpaper, elegant furniture, expressive silhouettes — distinguished the strip visually from rougher contemporaries. Daily strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics of the 1930s simply bound and sold.