Bringing Up Father — buf401012

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber, as his wife Maggie catches him scattering cigar ashes on the floor—a ritual she tolerates only because he's taking 'Spivey's Nerve Tonic.' Jiggs praises the elixir, feels suddenly weak, rushes off for another swig, and discovers the bottle empty. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: Art Nouveau flourishes on the furniture, elegantly cross-hatched blacks, and expressive round faces rendered with a jeweler's precision. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making McManus one of the first cartoonists to sustain a cast across years of daily and Sunday strips—the continuity model that shaped comic books directly when publishers began reprinting newspaper pages as collected pamphlets in the early 1930s.