Bringing Up Father — buf390109

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly wealthy Irish-American social climber, as he settles into domestic comfort — feet on the furniture, pipe lit in the parlor — until his imperious wife Maggie erupts in furious correction. The gag is pure domestic inversion: money bought the house but not peace. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it continuously for decades in syndication across hundreds of newspapers. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately distinctive — Art Nouveau-inflected interiors, curlicued furniture, characters with rubbery expressiveness. Newspaper comic strips like this one *were* the original comic book: their page layouts, repeating characters, and speech-balloon grammar built the visual language that collected reprint editions would formalize into the comic-book format by the late 1930s.