Bringing Up Father — buf400830

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* began in 1913 and ran for decades, following nouveau-riche Irish immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. In this daily, Maggie dispatches Jiggs to fire their insolent cook; he enters the kitchen, faces the intimidating woman, goes wordless, and retreats—reporting that nothing happened, then admitting nothing *would* have happened even if he'd spoken. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: sinuous Art Nouveau linework, precise crosshatching, and expressive rubber-limbed figures. The strip belongs to the Hearst-syndicated Sunday and daily pages that gave American comics their defining grammar—recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons—directly seeding the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.