Bringing Up Father — buf400828

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber immortalized by George McManus, as he tries to placate his sharp-tempered wife Maggie by washing the dishes while she is out — only to smash them and flee to buy a one-way train ticket to anywhere. McManus's line work is elegant and confident: ornate lamp bases, patterned jackets, and expressive spiked hair rendered in crisp pen strokes. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest continuous strips in American newspaper history. Such daily and Sunday pages — syndicated to hundreds of papers — established the recurring-character strip as commercial art's dominant form and supplied the reprinted anthology pamphlets that became the first true comic books.