Bringing Up Father — buf420412f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the eternal domestic war between Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman who longs for corned beef and the old neighborhood, and his social-climbing wife Maggie. This Sunday page turns on a single engine: Jiggs is starving, the cook is off, Maggie won't cook, and he eventually sneaks out — only to fall asleep and dream of a desert, waking to find Maggie waiting with the dishes. McManus drew in a sinuous Art Nouveau line, his interiors dense with decorative detail, his figures rubbery and expressive. Launched in 1913 in the *New York American*, the strip ran for decades and was syndicated worldwide — proof that the recurring-character newspaper page, with its locked panel grid and speech balloons, directly seeded what became the comic book format.