Bringing Up Father — buf430404f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This Sunday page follows Jiggs—the nouveau-riche Irish-American bricklayer turned socialite—sneaking out to play cards with Casey while telling wife Maggie he's off to the office. Maggie overhears, phones the police to raid the tool shed on Grogan's lot, and the gang escapes onto a construction dock just ahead of the law. McManus's draftsmanship is lush and precise: curvaceous Art Nouveau furniture, immaculate tuxedos, nine panels of tightly timed sight gags. Strips like this one taught readers the visual grammar—panel grids, speech balloons, recurring cast—that comic-book editors and artists would codify as their own medium through the 1930s and 40s.