Bringing Up Father — buf390414

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman in his polka-dot dressing gown, fretting over a missed appointment with "Sir Von Platter." A secretary fields his inquiry, Jiggs hails a cab in an expressively inked street scene, then faces his wife Maggie's sharp rebuke — defused by his excuse about the absent telephone. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, perfecting Art Nouveau-inflected linework, decorative crosshatching, and speech balloons whose lettering weight matched the speaker's emotion. The strip's recurring domestic comedy — social climbing, marital sparring, comic timing spread across horizontal panels — was precisely the syndicated newspaper format that printers repackaged as anthology pamphlets in the 1930s, producing the first comic books.