Bringing Up Father — buf390427

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the stout Irish-American parvenu of George McManus's long-running daily strip, as he rhapsodizes about his son — only for his glamorous, social-climbing wife Maggie and a curvaceous daughter to deflate each boast with a punchline about the boy being perpetually broke and about to arrive with his wife in tow, at father's expense. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: Art Nouveau–inflected curls, crosshatched interiors, and speech balloons arranged with confident economy. Launched in 1913 and syndicated globally for decades, *Bringing Up Father* was among the newspaper strips whose visual grammar — recurring cast, panel sequence, balloon-driven dialogue — fed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were largely reprints of exactly such daily and Sunday pages.