Bringing Up Father — buf390705

Four panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running daily — as he carries a tray of Maggie's china past their baby. The infant says "Goo," bats the dishes to the floor, and Jiggs, resigned, phones a store to order an unbreakable replacement set. McManus's line is elegantly fluid: Art Nouveau curves in the architecture, meticulously cross-hatched figures, speech balloons shaped to each character's voice. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and became one of the first strips syndicated worldwide, its domestic-comedy formula — hen-pecked husband, social-climbing wife — cementing the recurring-cast strip as the dominant newspaper form whose collected reprint pamphlets directly seeded the comic book industry of the late 1930s.