Bringing Up Father — buf390623

Six panels follow the Irish-immigrant social climber Jiggs and his imperious wife Maggie through a domestic standoff: Lord Worthnotten's son is coming to call, Maggie insists daughter Nora accept the engagement, Nora refuses to be told whom to befriend, and Maggie dissolves in tears while Jiggs delivers the dry closing aside. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913, his ligne-claire figures and decorative Art Nouveau interiors setting a visual standard that influenced a generation of cartoonists. The daily newspaper strip—syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide—was precisely the format that, collected and reprinted in pamphlet form through the 1930s, became the American comic book. McManus's confident panel-to-panel staging and expressive speech balloons are foundational grammar of the medium.