Bringing Up Father — buf390221

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant-made-good at the center of George McManus's long-running strip — as he secretly orders a sofa, intending to lock it in his room before his wife Maggie's freeloading brother can claim it as a bed. When the delivery men arrive, Jiggs spots that one *is* Maggie's brother, already asleep on the sofa mid-carry. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: architectural cross-hatching, art-nouveau flourishes on wallpaper and clothing, and balloon lettering that varies with emotion. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the newspaper dailies whose visual grammar — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — directly seeded the comic book format that coalesced commercially by 1938.