Bringing Up Father — buf400625

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as his wife Maggie interrogates him about a day of sightseeing that ended suspiciously at a hotel café. Jiggs claims he stopped only for milk after exhausting walking; he pivots to admiring statuary. The final two panels shift outdoors: soaked by continuous rain, Jiggs deadpans that he walked between the drops — met with Maggie's withering eye-roll. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, drawing on vaudeville's hen-pecked-husband routines and Art Nouveau ornament (note the candelabra flourishes). McManus's fluid brushwork and expressive balloon lettering were foundational to the visual grammar newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic book anthologists, who reprinted Sunday pages like these as the medium's earliest pamphlets.