Bringing Up Father — buf371117

Four panels track Jiggs — the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant who can't escape his social-climbing wife — fumbling a telephone call. A servant announces a lady on the line; Jiggs, seated at a desk, grabs the receiver grumbling about his wife's surveillance; a glamorous, heavily coiffed woman identified as Miss Dotty Cravat speaks on behalf of "Mr. Hugo Totown's office"; Jiggs, suddenly charming, melts into pleasantries. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running and most globally syndicated strips ever printed. McManus's sinuous Art Nouveau linework — decorative wallpaper, elegantly curved furniture, expressive balloon lettering — helped codify the visual grammar that daily newspaper pages passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.