Bringing Up Father — buf390602

Four panels track a domestic standoff: a stout woman sings at the piano, her hapless husband endures it on the sofa beside a wailing baby, attempts to hush the child by offering to stop the singing, and is finally pelted with a thrown object. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. The strip's central tension — immigrant-made-good Jiggs longing for corned beef and pool halls while wife Maggie wields social ambition and a rolling pin — generated gags for four decades. McManus's clean, art-nouveau-inflected linework and his confident deployment of speech balloons helped standardize the visual conventions that comic-book artists would inherit wholesale.