Bringing Up Father — buf371120

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he schemes to attend Dinty Moore's party against his domineering wife Maggie's wishes. He steels himself, confronts her, gets the predictable lecture about coming home early, then phones a doctor—not for himself but to have Maggie examined, neatly reversing the power dynamic as a punchline. McManus's line work is elegant and assured: art-deco interiors, expressive rubber-faced figures, and balloon lettering integral to the composition. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the architects of the daily comic strip's visual grammar—the recurring cast, compressed domestic situation, and punch-line final panel that daily strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.