Bringing Up Father — buf371005

Four black-and-white panels follow Jiggs, the henpecked Irish-American social climber, and his imperious wife Maggie as they wrangle over a dismissed butler who keeps turning up. The gag pivots on the third character — a gossipy new employer named Mrs. Annie Skandlegossip — whose name alone delivers the punchline before she speaks. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for over four decades and syndicating it worldwide. His art is immediately recognizable: elegantly curling Art Nouveau ornament on furniture and wallpaper behind broadly caricatured figures, speech balloons nested tightly in ruled panels. McManus's strip helped standardize the daily four-panel format and the recurring-cast domestic comedy that would directly seed the first comic-book reprint anthologies of the 1930s.