Bringing Up Father — buf390424

Four panels follow Jiggs as he lies to his imperious wife Maggie about working late at the office—his real aim being an escape to Dinty Moore's saloon. Maggie, tiara firmly in place, greets him with suspicious sympathy; Jiggs performs exhaustion with practiced flair; a servant closes the strip by delivering a package that exposes the alibi. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its six-decade run made it one of the longest continuous strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, precisely rendered speech balloons, and locked-in recurring cast were foundational conventions that editors and artists would carry directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s—reprinted newspaper pages, bound and sold on newsstands.