Bringing Up Father — buf390119

A three-panel daily strip in George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, one of the longest-running and most internationally syndicated comic strips in American newspaper history, launched in 1913. Here Jiggs — the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant who never sheds his working-class soul — arrives at a formal coming-out party wearing convict-striped trousers borrowed from his father-in-law, horrifying wife Maggie and the assembled guests. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: Art Nouveau flourishes on wallpaper and furniture, elegantly inked figures, and expressive rubber-faced reactions. Speech balloons cascade naturally across panels, deploying the visual grammar that newspaper comic pages had been refining since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s — the very syntax that early comic book publishers simply reprinted, panel-for-panel, to launch a new medium.