Bringing Up Father — buf400726

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's eternally hen-pecked Irish-American social climber, as he slips away to Harry's restaurant for coffee and two boiled eggs. A waiter takes his order, then reveals Harry is home sick in bed—undone by exactly those two boiled eggs the day before. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: sinuous Art Nouveau flourishes on clothing and furniture, figures rendered with rubbery expressiveness, speech balloons integrated cleanly into negative space. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for nearly nine decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. Such daily and Sunday pages were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their panel grids, recurring characters, and balloon conventions became the inherited grammar every subsequent comics artist worked within or against.