Bringing Up Father — buf371204

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie in their recurring domestic battle between nouveau-riche aspiration and working-class habit. Here Maggie frets about isolation in the country; Jiggs phones the police chief—only to find the station has moved, the riveter's dance is Tuesday, and a beauty contest looms at charity hall, each policeman cheerfully unhelpful. McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau line: curvaceous women in elaborate gowns, broad-shouldered men, and ornate interior detail. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 with George McManus, who had absorbed the Outcault–Dirks tradition of recurring strip characters with speech balloons—the very syntax that newspaper syndicates exported into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s, making daily strips like this one the direct ancestor of the comic book as a format.