Bringing Up Father — buf371209

Four panels by George McManus show Jiggs's daughter coaxing her bathrobed father to dress up and surprise Maggie on her return home. Jiggs obliges with comic enthusiasm — top hat, cane, musical notes floating around him — only to be flattened in the final panel by Maggie herself, who orders him to change immediately. McManus's line is fluid and elegant, his architecture and furniture rendered with Art Nouveau flourish against broad slapstick figures. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the strips whose daily and Sunday installments were later reprinted as bound pamphlets — the direct commercial ancestor of the comic book format that would consolidate by the 1930s.