Bringing Up Father — buf390314

Four panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American parvenu, asleep on a parlor sofa while his imperious wife Maggie and their daughter fuss nearby. A servant is summoned to wake him for bed — the gag turning on Jiggs being so inert that even his family forgets he exists. George McManus's line work is fluid and assured: elaborate crosshatching on upholstery, exaggerated silhouettes, and speech balloons that carry the full comic weight. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and helped fix the conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated dialogue — that daily strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.