Bringing Up Father — buf390214

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running daily strip, raiding the icebox on a diet imposed by his domineering wife Maggie. He eats what turn out to be dog biscuits, feels briefly satisfied, then learns from Maggie they were thrown out as too stale for the dog. McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship — ornate wallpaper, curved furniture, immaculate speech balloons integrated into the image — refined the visual grammar Outcault and Dirks had roughed out in the 1890s. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and fed directly into the reprint anthology format that became the comic book. McManus's elegant linework remains a benchmark of the newspaper comic art form.