Bringing Up Father — buf390519

Four panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checkered suit — sneaking out without telling his status-obsessed wife Maggie to reach a card game. He encounters a crawling baby who babbles "Igali-gali" and "Bau-da-bau," charming him long enough that neighbors in the final panel wonder aloud why Jiggs "doesn't play" anymore. George McManus's line work is fluid and architectural, his interiors crowded with Art Nouveau flourishes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, reaching hundreds of papers worldwide. McManus's mastery of sequential panel rhythm, expressive gesture, and speech-balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar that newspaper comic strips — the direct ancestors of the comic book — passed to every subsequent generation of cartoonists.