Bringing Up Father — buf390905

Three horizontal panels follow Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's long-running Irish-American couple, through a living-room planning scene. A travel agent lays out an American itinerary — Yellowstone geysers among the stops — while Maggie, draped across a chair, cheerfully volunteers her own list of local haunts: Dinty Moore's laundry, a foundry, a gas house, a chop-suey joint. The final panel's giant exclamation point, Jiggs's silent horror, is pure McManus economy. His brushwork is among the most elegant in daily comics: Art Nouveau curlicues on furniture, crosshatched gowns, fluid figure placement. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its syndicated dailies and Sundays forming the commercial backbone from which comic books — reprinting exactly such strips — were assembled and sold as a new medium throughout the 1930s.