Bringing Up Father — buf400307

George McManus's long-running strip follows Jiggs, the lace-curtain-Irish social climber in top hat and spats, dragged by his wife Maggie toward cultural improvement. Here she insists on a Senate gallery visit to witness great men of government; Jiggs watches senators locked in what turns out to be idle gossip about a fishing trip and a missed party — the 'serious debate' deflated to pure bathos. McManus's line is elegant, almost Art Nouveau in its curling ornament, the figures broad and theatrical. Strips like this one *are* the origin point: syndicated daily and Sunday pages from Outcault, McManus, and their peers established the visual grammar — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — that anthology reprint collections would package as the first comic books in the 1930s.