Bringing Up Father — buf371214

Four dailies panels follow the perennial domestic tug-of-war between Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American laborer who longs for a night out, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here Jiggs is told to stay home and enjoy it; he promptly orders his butler Pierre to telephone Mrs. Mary Hanweep, planning to demonstrate that a happy home-life is possible — only to learn Hanweep has fled to Reno for a divorce. The gag lands on a silent question mark. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: ruled architectural backgrounds, sinuous Art Nouveau ornament, and crisply lettered speech balloons. Running from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest strips to establish the recurring-cast daily strip as a narrative form, its visual conventions feeding directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted newspaper pages.