Bringing Up Father — buf411005f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This October 5, 1941 Sunday page follows Jiggs — the nouveau-riche Irishman forever henpecked by social-climbing wife Maggie — on a farcical errand chain: sent to retrieve a borrowed book, he finds himself passing lamps, goldfish bowls, dogs, golf clubs, and packages across a neighborhood web of mutual borrowers, ending with a stranger demanding the brand-new book tucked under his arm. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakably Art Nouveau–inflected: sinuous wallpaper patterns, ornate furniture, and elegant panel borders give the strip a decorative refinement rare in the funny pages. The strip's recurring domestic premise and expressive balloon lettering helped codify the visual conventions that early comic-book anthologies — which reprinted newspaper pages wholesale — inherited wholesale.