Bringing Up Father — buf390406

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American patriarch of George McManus's long-running daily strip, as he discovers his daughter has slipped out to avoid an unwanted suitor, Sir Von Platter, who then arrives at the door anyway. McManus's line work is ornate and fluid — patterned wallpaper, curlicued hair, precise tuxedos — while the gag turns on domestic deception and comic deflation. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide. McManus, heir to the visual wit of Richard Outcault and Rudolph Dirks, helped codify the grammar of sequential art: the speech balloon as theatrical aside, the recurring cast anchoring reader loyalty, the single-strip gag resolving in a sight-joke. These newspaper dailies are the direct ancestors of the comic book format.