Bringing Up Father — buf371124

Four panels follow Jiggs—the round, henpecked Irish-immigrant husband created by George McManus—as his wife Maggie demands her missing black and green thread spools. Jiggs, pipe in mouth, shuffles toward the doorway asking whether she called him "darling" or was "just starting to sing"; in the third panel he tumbles spectacularly through a circular mirror, stars bursting everywhere; in the fourth he sits dazed on the floor holding a spool, reporting that one eye is now black. McManus's draftsmanship is lush: Art Nouveau arabesques, checkered vests, and precise cross-hatching. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, and its tightly sequenced gag-and-punchline dailies directly shaped the panel grammar that comic-book writers would codify through the 1930s and '40s.