Bringing Up Father — buf400124

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish-American, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This two-panel daily strip opens mid-chaos: the family scrambles to reach St. Paul in time for the Winter Carnival, luggage piled absurdly high. In the second panel, their overloaded plane bursts into the sky, Jiggs airborne amid a avalanche of trunks and hatboxes, worrying only about lunch. McManus launched the strip in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His art — elegantly cross-hatched, Art Nouveau-inflected backgrounds against broadly caricatured figures — helped standardize the visual conventions American newspaper comics exported worldwide: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and the recurring-character serial that directly seeded the comic-book format.