Bringing Up Father — buf391106

Four panels follow a well-dressed couple newly arrived in Oklahoma City. The husband spots a local and predicts he can read the man's character at a glance — only for the stranger to open with the same boast in reverse, pegging *him* as a New Yorker by the oil in his hair. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, crowded speech balloons, and socially mobile Irish-immigrant protagonists Jiggs and Maggie helped codify the daily comic strip's visual grammar — the same grammar that, when strips were reprinted as cheap pamphlets in the 1930s, gave the comic book its format and its audience.