Bringing Up Father — buf391221

Four panels follow Maggie, the social-climbing wife, taking a phone call from 'Captain Funnell' and dressing up the encounter for her daughter — only for Jiggs to deflate the pretension entirely: the 'Captain' is a barge captain on the Erie Canal. George McManus's linework is fluid Art Deco elegance, the women's gowns and hair rendered with near-fashion-illustration precision against Jiggs's rumpled checkered suit. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making McManus one of the architects of the recurring-character daily strip. The strip's domestic tension — nouveau-riche wife versus happily lowbrow husband — translated directly into the early comic-book anthology format, which simply reprinted newspaper dailies and Sundays, establishing panel sequence, speech balloons, and visual comic timing as the grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.