Bringing Up Father — buf390930

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he declines his wife Maggie's company to sightsee San Francisco alone. A passing singer's melody stops him cold — marked by a floating question mark — before Maggie ambushes him with cloying affection ('Honey, I love you so much — I've got the hives'), sending him bolting into the street past a startled bystander. George McManus, who signed the strip from its 1913 launch, drew with a fluid Art Nouveau line, elaborate wallpaper patterns, and expressive balloon lettering that influenced decades of cartoonists. *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for over eighty years, and its daily and Sunday pages — reproduced cheaply, then collected — form the direct commercial and visual ancestry of the American comic book.