Bringing Up Father — buf391115

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, who debuted in *New York American* in 1913 and ran for nearly nine decades. Here Jiggs dozes, dreaming of Milwaukee breweries rendered in McManus's characteristically clean, decorative line — smoke stacks, Gothic lettering, cloud-framed skyline. Waking with an "Ah!", he urges Maggie to stop in Milwaukee heading east; she meets "that's a famous mill—" with a question mark, the pun landing silently. McManus inherited Outcault's and Dirks's panel-and-balloon grammar and refined it into an elegantly spare Art Nouveau draftsmanship. These newspaper dailies — syndicated to hundreds of papers — provided the reprint content for the first comic books of the 1930s, making strips like this the literal raw material of the medium.