Bringing Up Father — buf390627

Four panels follow Jiggs — the parvenu Irish-American social climber created by George McManus — as he tries to comfort a wailing baby. He coaches the infant to be a "big man" who doesn't cry, only to be baffled by the child's babbling ("Goo-gee-gaw-") and then interrupted by his imperious wife Maggie, who sobs that her name was left off the society page. The joke inverts neatly: Jiggs's lecture on stoicism collapses the moment Maggie enters weeping over trivialities. McManus's brushwork is distinctive — razor-sharp ink lines, ornate wallpaper cross-hatching, characters rendered with rubbery expressiveness. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers globally and helped standardize the daily strip's panel-to-panel visual shorthand that proto-comic-book editors would later adopt wholesale.