Bringing Up Father — buf391214

Four panels follow Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American parvenu in top hat and checked suit, as he hires a city guide in Dayton, Ohio — only to spend eight hours on the phone while his wife Maggie shops and acquires six evening gowns. The final panel delivers the punchline deadpan: darkness has fallen and there is nothing left to see. George McManus's linework is characteristically elegant — sinuous Art Nouveau figures, precise cross-hatching, Maggie rendered as a commanding silhouette. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in King Features Syndication, becoming one of the strips that proved daily newspaper comics could sustain complex recurring characters and serialized domestic comedy — the direct commercial and formal ancestor of the comic book format that would crystallize by decade's end.