Bringing Up Father — buf390829

This four-panel daily strip follows the eternal domestic standoff between Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Here the gag turns on a cascade of blocked travel plans: daughter Nora wants the family ready to leave Saturday, Maggie deflects with dressmaker delays, then a director's meeting, then sheer stubbornness — until Jiggs mutters that getting the party started is harder than launching a horse race. George McManus, who signed the strip from 1913 until his death in 1954, drew in a distinctive art-nouveau-inflected line, with exaggerated coiffures and expressive rubber-limbed figures. McManus's mastery of speech-balloon pacing and panel-to-panel comic timing helped establish the visual conventions that syndicators carried into millions of homes — and that early comic-book publishers directly reprinted, making strips like this literal building blocks of the medium.