Bringing Up Father — buf371201

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he hides from an imperious female caller, lets the maid handle her, then surfaces once she has gone — only to turn his attention to pitching what appears to be a newfangled phonograph or radio cabinet to a buyer. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: confident brush lines, Art Nouveau curves on the women's figures, and precisely lettered speech balloons that carry the whole comic rhythm. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades and helped standardize the daily comic strip's sequential grammar — fixed recurring characters, consistent panel grids, gag-per-strip pacing — that proto-comic-book anthologists would soon package as the medium's first collected pamphlets.