Bringing Up Father — buf391216

Four panels follow Jiggs, the perennially henpecked Irish-American social climber, plotting a solo escape to see Akron while his wife Maggie is occupied. Each character in turn begs off the evening's plans until Maggie catches on and threatens to read to the ailing Jiggs — whereupon he asks for a hammer, having apparently already hit himself with it. McManus's line is fluid and confident: curvilinear Art Nouveau figures set against spare, uncluttered backgrounds, speech balloons shaped to each speaker's energy. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, one of the foundational King Features strips whose daily and Sunday installments — collected into pamphlets as early as 1919 — directly prefigured the comic book format, establishing recurring characters, serialized domestic comedy, and the visual grammar millions of readers first learned to follow.