Bringing Up Father — buf420621f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows nouveau-riche Irishman Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie across four tiers of Sunday-page panels. In this wartime strip, Maggie invites two suave con men — Count Armond and Mr. Boris Summore — to dinner; Jiggs alone suspects them as crooks with burglar tools in their pockets. A radio-announced blackout gives the thieves their moment: lights out, one hour later, jewels, furniture, radio, faucets, even Jiggs's trousers are gone. McManus's elegant brushwork — fluid Art Nouveau figures, meticulous interiors — launched in 1913 and ran over forty years, making *Bringing Up Father* one of the foundational recurring-character strips whose panel-and-balloon grammar the earliest comic books directly reprinted and inherited.