Bringing Up Father — buf391023

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus in 1913, on what appears to be a disastrous desert holiday. Panel one: Jiggs praises the desert's dryness — and its wetness. Panel two: he wanders, dwarfed by fantastically ornate totem-like rock formations rendered in McManus's signature Art Nouveau linework, all dense crosshatching and decorative patterning. Panel three: he's collapsed in a hotel bed, phoning for the house doctor. McManus's strip ran in Hearst papers for over four decades; its recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons exemplify the visual syntax that daily newspaper comics codified — the direct ancestor of the comic-book page format that would dominate American popular culture within the decade.