Bringing Up Father — buf420719f

Twelve panels follow Jiggs—the corned-beef-and-cabbage Irishman made good—as he recruits a pal to pose as a butler, slipping past his imperious wife Maggie. The gag turns on a rope lowered from an upper window, a fake hiring-and-firing scheme, and Maggie's eventual dismissal of the impostor. George McManus's linework is immediately recognizable: Art Nouveau-inflected furniture, beautifully dressed women, and Jiggs's round, hapless face. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, its domestic battle-of-the-sexes formula and recurring cast helping establish the conventions—speech balloons, sequential panels, weekly continuity—that Sunday newspaper pages passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.