Bringing Up Father — buf430131f

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by the 1940s it was syndicated to over 500 papers worldwide — one of the longest-running Sunday pages in American comics history. This nine-panel Sunday strip follows Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American who'd rather drink with old pals than attend his wife Maggie's social ambitions. Here the gag escalates gloriously: Jiggs drinks something vile, staggers home through a city where a well-meaning patriot has donated all the zoo's iron cage bars to a wartime scrap-iron drive — releasing hippos, rhinos, lions, and leopards onto the streets. McManus's clean, Art Deco-inflected linework, his crowded slapstick crowd scenes, and the strip's confident panel-to-panel rhythm exemplify the visual grammar that newspaper Sunday pages established and that early comic books directly inherited.