Bringing Up Father — buf390206

Three panels follow Jiggs, the henpecked Irish-American social climber, practicing buffet-table balance at home while his wife and daughter look on skeptically. The gag turns on Jiggs rehearsing how to juggle plates before a formal supper — his wife unimpressed, his daughter wry. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 and ran it for decades, his art distinguished by sinuous Art Nouveau lines, boldly patterned clothing, and expressive speech balloons that convey class anxiety through visual rhythm alone. McManus, alongside Outcault and Dirks, forged the recurring-character daily strip format that syndicates packaged into the first reprint comic books of the early 1930s — making newspaper comics the direct ancestor of the comic-book medium.