Bringing Up Father — buf430411f

Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American in top hat and tails, storms out on his wife Maggie — then melts into nostalgia across a long sequence of park-bench reveries: the young Maggie cooking, singing, shy on the day he proposed. Remorse sends him home, only to be flattened by a rolling-pin in the final panel. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, perfecting a domestic-comedy loop that ran for decades. His brushwork — fine cross-hatching, confident figure outlines, Art Nouveau flourishes in furniture and dress — set a visual standard for Sunday pages. Those pages, accumulated and reprinted, directly seeded the first comic books; the recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and speech-balloon choreography McManus refined here are the medium's foundational vocabulary.