Bringing Up Father — buf390331

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American everyman of George McManus's long-running daily strip, through a workplace errand. A woman dispatches him to vouch for her brother-in-law; Jiggs locates the man at a construction site — shovels in hand — only to find him asleep under a table, surrounded by the untouched tools, a question mark floating above his hat. McManus's line is elegant and Art Deco-inflected: crosshatched backgrounds, decorative ironwork, characters rendered with fluid contour and expressive silhouette. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and was among the strips that trained readers to parse sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring cast — the visual conventions that newspaper comics handed directly to the comic book format emerging in this same decade.