Bringing Up Father — buf420705f

Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish immigrant with a weakness for corned beef and pool halls, gets ordered by his formidable wife Maggie to weed their garden. Too proud to admit defeat against a stubborn shrub, he recruits friends, then phones "Casey" for three men — and eventually commandeers an army tank to do the job, demolishing the garden wall in the process. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's clean, art-nouveau-inflected line — decorative wallpaper, elegantly curved furniture — set the visual standard for domestic comedy strips. Sunday pages like this one, with their sequential panel flow and integrated speech balloons, directly trained the eye of the comic-book generation.