Bringing Up Father — buf390506

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checkered vest, through a comic humiliation: his wife Maggie has placed a baby photo of their son on his office desk; colleagues at the office erupt in laughter imagining what the child will look like grown up; Jiggs retreats muttering "fine bunch of guys they are." George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades across hundreds of newspapers worldwide. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework—bold outlines, decorative wallpaper patterns, expressive crowd staging—helped standardize the daily comic strip's visual language: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast whose domestic tensions readers tracked like serialized fiction. These syndicated strips are the direct ancestors of the comic book format.