Bringing Up Father — buf401022

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber, through a domestic comedy of masculine pride. In the first he mutters that a tonic has left him weak as a kitten — but he must keep up the bluff. His fashionable daughter then flexes and boasts she's strong as a bull. Her father, rather than admit frailty, is immediately conscripted to haul furniture upstairs, ending the strip crushed under a dresser, ruefully wishing he'd kept quiet. McManus's draftsmanship — fluid Art Nouveau curves, elaborate hatching, exaggerated facial takes — set a visual standard for daily strips. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, is among the earliest strips to establish the recurring cast, the running situation, and the compressed four-panel joke structure that newspaper pages carried directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.