Bringing Up Father — buf400615

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perpetually henpecked Irish-American social climber, wearing an outlandish plaid suit and mismatched hat — apparently the losing end of an election bet. His companion recoils at the "get-up"; Jiggs explains cheerfully that Maggie's hats inspired the look; in the final panel Maggie herself is already in mid-air, launching a projectile. McManus's line work is elegant: crosshatched backgrounds, expressive rubber-limbed figures, and stars-and-motion-lines that comics inherited from vaudeville posters. *Bringing Up Father* debuted in 1913 and ran continuously for decades, its Sunday pages syndicated globally. Those newspaper pages — not magazine anthologies — are where panel-to-panel storytelling, speech balloons, and recurring cast characters were refined into the visual grammar that the comic-book format would later codify and industrialize.