Bringing Up Father — buf370928

Four daily panels by George McManus (signed lower right) follow the strip's central comic engine: Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman, sits bandaged in an armchair complaining that his doctor hasn't visited in two weeks. Maggie, his socially ambitious wife, phones the physician, who turns out to have sent Jiggs's checkbook on a world cruise in his place. The final beat — Maggie fuming, Jiggs blank — is pure vaudeville timing rendered in McManus's signature Art Nouveau linework: fluid ink, ornate wallpaper, candelabra, and women in elaborate hats. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus refined the recurring-character strip format that newspaper dailies exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.