Bringing Up Father — buf400118

Four panels follow Jiggs — rotund, top-hatted, cigar in mouth — as he walks from close-up to wide shot, arriving at the gates of the White House and muttering, "By golly — now that I'm here I wonder if he'll see me?" George McManus's linework is fluid and economical: thick contour strokes, crosshatched blacks, and bare backgrounds that snap the reader's eye forward. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century, syndicated worldwide. McManus refined the recurring-character strip into a reliable daily ritual, and his elegant Art Nouveau draftsmanship — absorbed from Mucha — gave the American newspaper page a visual sophistication that early comic book publishers would directly inherit when they began reprinting Sunday strips as bound pamphlets in the 1930s.