Bringing Up Father — buf400416

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman forever caught between his wife Maggie's social ambitions and his own simpler pleasures. In this four-panel daily, the family is in Oklahoma City: Jiggs, cigar in mouth and checkerboard suit, muses about sightseeing while Maggie and a companion make elaborate plans — hat shop, antique store, tea, auction, movie — until Jiggs slips off alone toward something across the street marked only with a question mark. McManus's clean brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and clockwork comic timing represent the daily newspaper strip at full maturity. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the features whose page layouts, recurring characters, and speech-balloon conventions directly shaped the format that early comic-book publishers would repackage and sell beginning in the mid-1930s.