Bringing Up Father — buf400729

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveaux-riche Irish immigrant, sprawled on a chaise longue declaring there's no place like home — because he can't think of anywhere else to go. Maggie, his socially ambitious wife, takes a phone call from a Mrs. Van Antruck, enthusiastically accepting an opera invitation while Jiggs has quietly vanished. Asked his whereabouts, a visitor deadpans he's probably in Canada by now. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, drawing on his own family's immigrant anxieties; his sinuous Art Nouveau linework and precise spotted blacks set a visual standard that influenced a generation of cartoonists. The daily and Sunday newspaper strip format McManus worked in was the direct ancestor of the comic book — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — all the grammar invented here.