Bringing Up Father — buf390213

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irishman in top hat and checkered suit, as he escapes his wife Maggie's diet by slipping off to a movie. A doorman quotes his Chinese fortune cookie; Jiggs imagines a banquet scene—rendered in lush crosshatch, the table heaped with food, candlelight glinting off gilt mirrors—before the final panel plants him outside a theatre, arriving just in time for the feast on screen. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its fluid Art Nouveau linework, exaggerated silhouettes, and tightly sequenced domestic comedy made it one of the most syndicated strips on earth. The daily newspaper strip—not the anthology pamphlet—invented the comic book's core grammar: recurring cast, panel gutters, speech balloons, and visual shorthand for emotion that cartoonists still use today.