Bringing Up Father — buf390121

Six panels track Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, slumped asleep in an armchair while his formidable wife Maggie monopolizes the telephone for three hours. Maggie gossips effusively, waves off callers at the door — the baker, the grocery man — and snaps at Jiggs not to interrupt. The final panel returns to Jiggs, still snoring, two hours later. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean brushwork, spotted blacks, and precisely lettered speech balloons became a template for the daily newspaper strip. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau interiors and expressive figure drawing influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated dailies, collected and reprinted, were the direct commercial ancestor of the comic book format.