Bringing Up Father — buf430523f

Twelve panels track Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American husband, left alone when his wife and mother-in-law visit her brother. Seizing his freedom, he phones Hogan's plumbing shop, a carpenter, and a painter—ostensibly to fix the house, actually to assemble a card game. The final tier delivers the payoff: tradesmen, a telegram boy, and assorted arrivals crowd the door while Jiggs beams at his luck. McManus draws in a florid Art Nouveau line—ornate furniture, silhouetted figures, bold blacks—that made *Bringing Up Father* (launched 1913) one of the most widely syndicated strips in the world. Sunday pages like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book: their panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast established the visual grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.