Bringing Up Father — buf401018

Four panels follow Jiggs — McManus's eternal social climber in black suit and white tie — through a domestic crisis. Desperate for the nerve tonic Spivey gave him, he bursts through a door shouting *"Where is he?!"* only to find his imperious, flower-hatted wife Maggie instead of the butler. A sheepish apology follows; Jiggs escapes humiliation by the skin of his teeth. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: fluid ink line, decorative patterning on Maggie's dress, and expressive rubber-limbed figures indebted to vaudeville. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the strips whose daily and Sunday pages were literally cut, folded, and reprinted to form the first comic books — making McManus a direct architect of the medium's physical form.