Bringing Up Father — buf390612

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running strip, as he palms off a crying baby on a companion, escapes to a doctor's appointment, returns to find the baby babbling "Goo-goo," and learns via a frantic messenger that his own son is ill at home. McManus's ligne claire linework — ornate hatching, curling smoke, exaggerated reaction takes — defined newspaper comic-strip draftsmanship from 1913 onward. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated by King Features, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and fed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted newspaper strips reformatted into pamphlets. Speech balloons, sequential panels, and recurring cast: McManus and his peers invented the grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.