Bringing Up Father — buf391004

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, dispatched to San Francisco's Chinatown to find a son-in-law who went missing at a restaurant called 'Chew Wan Chew.' His wife Maggie fumes at home while Jiggs wanders into an opium-den interior hung with lanterns and Chinese characters, muttering 'This must be the joint—' before realizing his quarry spent years in China. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: Art Nouveau curlicues on clothing, ink-black silhouettes, and meticulous crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for nearly a century, syndicated globally. McManus refined the speech balloon and sequential panel grammar that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic book editors of the late 1930s.