Bringing Up Father — buf390811

Four panels follow the perpetual domestic war between Jiggs and Maggie. Here Jiggs's daughter urges him to compliment Maggie's new monocle; he agrees, steels himself, tells Maggie the monocle makes her look fifty years younger — and lands in a star-burst heap on the floor, shoes flying. The gag turns on the classic Bringing Up Father engine: Jiggs's hapless diplomacy defeated by his own timing. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, its fluid Art Nouveau linework and expressive silhouettes influencing a generation of cartoonists. The daily newspaper strip — syndicated to hundreds of papers — was the direct seedbed of the comic book: page dimensions shrank, panels multiplied, speech balloons standardized, and recurring characters taught readers to return daily. McManus's clean draftsmanship and architectural interior staging remain benchmarks of the form.