Bringing Up Father — buf371216

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's irrepressible Irish-American social climber, as his wife Maggie harangues him out of bed at six in the morning to behave like the building's respectable tenants. Jiggs shuffles to the front entrance, holds the door for a crowd of top-hatted strangers, and is thanked by people who assume he's the doorman. McManus's line work is clean and rounded, his figures elegantly caricatured, his staging reliant on the deadpan reaction shot that early comic-strip artists perfected. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century and helped establish the recurring-character daily strip as a popular form whose page-layout conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, consistent cast — fed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.