Bringing Up Father — buf400520

Four panels follow the eternal domestic tug-of-war between Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. She marches him through an unnamed city promising culture; he spots a hat shop and ducks inside — emerging five hours later, slumped on a bench. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. McManus's line work — sinuous Art Nouveau flourishes, the silhouetted second panel, Maggie's towering hat — influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated daily strips, printed in millions of papers, are the direct ancestors of the comic book: they standardized sequential panels, speech balloons, and the recurring cast that readers returned to each morning.