Bringing Up Father — buf391208

Four horizontal panels follow two top-hatted men strolling a city street — one of them Jiggs, George McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber. A booster rhapsodizes about his city's parks, hospitable people, and fine buildings; a third figure ends the gag by one-upping him with a question mark, implying his own hometown tops everything. McManus's line work is sinuous and confident: Art Nouveau curves in the lamp posts, crosshatched coats, and balloon lettering that flows naturally from the characters' mouths. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally, making McManus one of the architects of the daily comic strip's visual language — the fixed recurring cast, the sequential panel rhythm, and the wordless punch-panel that became standard grammar for every comic book that followed.