Bringing Up Father — buf400429

Three panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's perennial Irish-immigrant social climber, on a visit to Texas. A Stetson-wearing host toasts "the Lone Star State"; Jiggs deflects with the dry crack that "the best of the stars are in Hollywood"; then, stepping outside at night, he marvels at the star-dense Texas sky — "By golly, that star certainly has company tonight." McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: crosshatched shadows, a richly patterned night sky rendered in dense stipple, and figures in formal evening wear that signal Jiggs's aspirational milieu. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades and helped codify the newspaper strip's visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a fixed cast whose tensions reset weekly — directly influencing the comic book format that coalesced in the late 1930s.