Bringing Up Father — buf400814

Four panels track one of the longest-running gags in *Bringing Up Father*: Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American, gets a suggestion from his secretary, invites her home to dinner unannounced, and faces a furious, hair-in-curlers Maggie who announces she is 'not dressed.' McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau-inflected line — bold silhouettes, spotted blacks, elegant furniture — giving even domestic chaos a decorative finish. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades across hundreds of newspapers, helping establish the daily comic strip as America's first mass visual narrative form: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying distinct voices, continuity gags. McManus's draftsmanship directly influenced a generation of cartoonists who would later shape the comic book medium itself.