Bringing Up Father — buf390308

Four panels follow the domestic comedy of Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish immigrant eternally at war with respectability, here caught asleep on the sofa. A child schemes to rouse him by having Maggie sing — her notoriously bad aim with thrown crockery is punned in the song lyric "Mama misses Papa because her aim is bad." A thrown object sends Jiggs flying; the final panel shows him suspended mid-air, a question mark overhead, still snoring (the *Z* floating beside him). George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His art — fluid brushwork, decorative Art Nouveau interiors, expressive silhouettes — helped codify the visual grammar of recurring comic-strip characters, speech balloons as dramatic voice, and panel-to-panel physical comedy that early comic-book editors would directly repackage as the medium's first anthologies.