Bringing Up Father — buf400529

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant bricklayer turned reluctant millionaire, slipping away from his social-climbing wife Maggie for a plate of corned beef and cabbage. Told he looks "just like Marsie," he cheerfully accepts the compliment, tracks down a restaurant two blocks from his hotel, and lands exactly where he wants to be. George McManus's line work is fluid and elegant—architectural backgrounds rendered with confident cross-hatching, characters built on rounded, expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, making McManus one of the architects of the daily comic strip's visual language: the locked panel grid, the speech balloon as narrative engine, and the recurring cast whose domestic tensions readers followed like serialized fiction.