Bringing Up Father — buf400408

Four panels follow Jiggs, the working-class Irish-American social climber, sitting homesick at a table longing for Dinty Moore's corned beef and cabbage. His wife Maggie reads aloud a letter describing a party — 'given by a Mr. Dinty Moore — rather unique — they had corned—' — before Jiggs shouts STOP! George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and it ran for nearly nine decades. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau line work — note the decorative lamp, the fluid silhouettes — distinguished the strip visually from rougher contemporaries. These syndicated daily strips, reproduced and trimmed, were the direct physical material earliest comic books reprinted, making strips like this one literal building blocks of the medium's print format.