Bringing Up Father — buf391108

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he brandishes train tickets to Kansas City — only to be diverted by his wife Maggie, who has read that five movie stars were robbed there and that ax-handle makers are holding a convention. Jiggs cheerfully admits he has attended a convention before, then asks the ticket agent to postpone the trip a week. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: elegant Art Nouveau linework, ornate furniture, and characters rendered with rubber-limbed expressiveness. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the daily newspaper strips whose recurring cast and sequential panels directly supplied the raw material — and visual grammar — for the first comic books, which were largely reprints of such strips before original content emerged in the late 1930s.