Bringing Up Father — buf390417

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the round-faced Irish-American social climber in top hat and striped trousers, dispatched by his domineering wife Maggie to attend the opera and report back. Instead he meets cronies at a table, conspires to fake attendance by meeting 'Sir Von Platter,' then returns home claiming the performance was wonderful — before admitting he hadn't the slightest idea what it was about since it was sung in Italian. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its continuous run through mid-century made it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus's Art Nouveau–influenced linework — sinuous furniture, patterned walls, elegantly dressed figures — gave newspaper comics an unexpected decorative ambition, while Jiggs's eternal battle between pretension and the saloon defined the recurring-character comedy that newspaper dailies handed wholesale to the first comic books of the 1930s.