Bringing Up Father — buf401213

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he maneuvers his young daughter out of the house — urging her to play with the neighbor boy so he can nap in peace. The punchline: a baseball sails through the window and crowns him with a sharp "OW!" McManus's line work is elegant and economical — parlor furniture rendered with Art Nouveau curlicues, figures built from confident, looping brushstrokes. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. McManus helped establish the recurring-character daily strip as a commercial institution, and the Sunday page format he worked in directly seeded the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.