Bringing Up Father — buf401019

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its central tension never changed: Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American, wants a quiet armchair and a pipe; his social-climbing wife Maggie wants shopping and society. In this four-panel daily strip Jiggs feigns sleep to dodge Maggie and their daughter, who debates waking him; the women conclude he is too cross to bother and leave for window-shopping — whereupon Jiggs mutters he has escaped. McManus's brushwork is elegant and economical: silhouetted figures in the exit panel, expressive posture doing the comedy's heavy lifting. The strip exemplifies what newspaper syndication built between the 1890s and 1930s — recurring cast, speech balloons, sequential panel grammar — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format that emerged in collected reprint form by the mid-1930s.