Bringing Up Father — buf400211

Two concurrent Sunday strips follow Jiggs and Maggie through slapstick domestic combat. The top strip, drawn in a crisp Art Deco shorthand, shows Archie dodging flying crockery while his boss second-guesses his own clumsiness. The lower strip — the *Bringing Up Father* page proper, signed by McManus — sends Jiggs and Maggie on a New York City tour: the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, a chaotic pushcart street, the Museum of Natural History. Jiggs inevitably slips away; a salesman uses a bat instead of a whistle. George McManus, working since 1913, perfected the recurring-character Sunday page: bold outlines, symmetrical crowd compositions, and speech balloons as architecture. His strips were direct ancestors of the comic book format standardized by 1938.