Bringing Up Father — buf390710

Four daily panels follow the long-running domestic war between social-climber Maggie and her hen-pecked husband Jiggs. Here Maggie frets that their daughter ignores a suitable suitor; Jiggs quietly plays with a toy on the floor while she schemes. She storms off to lecture the girl, delivering a doorstep harangue about children ignoring parental wisdom and the epidemic of "silly marriages." The final panel finds Jiggs deadpanning that the speech "has all the earmarks of a slam." George McManus's line work is sinuous and decorative—Art Nouveau curlicues meet rubber-limbed figures. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its recurring cast and sequential panels exemplifying the newspaper daily strip format that directly fed the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.