Bringing Up Father — buf400508

George McManus's long-running strip follows Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, and his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs slips out at night — supposedly to admire the moon — and finds himself in an arid canyon landscape. A stranger asks where to get a drink; Jiggs, knocked flat for his trouble, points seven miles up the canyon to a water hole. McManus's rounded, elegant linework, borrowed partly from Art Nouveau fashion illustration, made *Bringing Up Father* (launched 1913) one of the most internationally syndicated strips of the early twentieth century. Sunday pages and dailies like this one established the visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that newspaper syndicates exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.