Bringing Up Father — buf390725

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American social climber in top hat and checked suit, as he asks wife Maggie to remove something from his eye before heading to the office. Maggie threatens violence, invoking the family's new noble son-in-law as reason for refined behavior. Jiggs bolts outside, relieved to escape — only to walk straight into a lamppost, stars exploding around his head, monocle flying, as he mutters he can't see without it. George McManus's strip, syndicated from 1913, was a cornerstone of American newspaper comics. Its fluid Art Nouveau linework, expressive pantomime, and domestic comedy of manners helped establish the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — that newspaper dailies handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.