Bringing Up Father — buf430314f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Irish-immigrant-made-good Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie across twelve panels of escalating domestic chaos. Here Jiggs slips away from a society tea party to join old friends at the swimming hole, loses his clothes to a passing train, and slinks home through a sewer pipe — only to bluff his way past Maggie in what the strip implies is a policeman's uniform. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: plump, rubbery figures, Art Nouveau decorative borders, and a balloon-and-panel grammar he helped standardize from the strip's 1913 debut. Sunday pages like this one — printed in color broadsheets and later anthologized — are the direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.