Bringing Up Father — buf390116

Five panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American bricklayer turned millionaire, as his wife Maggie hides his evening clothes to prevent him attending a chowder party. Undeterred, Jiggs rings for a servant, borrows a bathrobe, and threatens his wife with a black eye — the strip's signature domestic-combat gag delivered in compressed, punchy dialogue balloons. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau linework — ornate interiors, precise crosshatching, fluid figure drawing — distinguished him from rougher contemporaries. The strip's daily and Sunday pages, syndicated globally, exemplify the newspaper comic as the direct ancestor of the comic book: recurring characters, sequential panel logic, and speech balloons refined into a mature visual language.