Bringing Up Father — buf400117

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveaux-riche Irish-American bricklayer, as his imperious wife Maggie insists he dress for a senatorial dinner guest. The gag pivots on class collision: Jiggs, bewildered by evening clothes, greets the arriving Senator and his wife with a cheerful "Howdy folks — where's the chow?" George McManus's draftsmanship is characteristically elegant — curvaceous Art Nouveau linework, ornate interiors, expressive rubber-limbed figures — against which Jiggs's vulgarity lands harder. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran sixty-plus years and was among the most widely syndicated strips globally. McManus, trained on Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World*, helped codify the recurring-cast daily strip format whose panel sequences and speech balloons formed the direct template for the comic book page.