Bringing Up Father — buf401023

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs reports his wife's brother Danny has stolen his nerve tonic, then plots escape while a neighbor woman reveals Danny drank it, passed out, and — punchline — is now phoning in that he'll be late working overtime. McManus draws in a clean, art-deco line with crosshatched suits and expressive rubber-limbed figures, the speech balloons stacked economically across narrow panels. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and was among the recurring newspaper features that taught readers — and publishers — that serialized cartoon characters could anchor daily papers, directly seeding the anthology reprint comics that became the American comic book.