Bringing Up Father — buf400316

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat, as he wanders Washington, D.C., baffled that he cannot locate something he wants. Slumping in an armchair, he mutters he may have to flee to Baltimore or Philadelphia. His daughter and the imperious Maggie press him to explain his gloom; he confesses that not one restaurant in the entire city lists corned beef and cabbage. Maggie's withering reply — *Shut up* — closes the strip. McManus's draftsmanship is at peak elegance here: crosshatched checked suit, sinuous art-nouveau flourishes on Maggie's gown, confident brushwork on the Washington Monument cameo. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first strips exported globally and helped fix the visual conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.