Bringing Up Father — buf430613f

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the hapless Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually caught between his love of low-life pleasures and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. This Sunday page tracks Jiggs through a slapstick chase involving a lost diamond ring, a nightclub called the Danzandanz, a character named Moochie, and a mob of reporters and insurance men converging at a stage door — each panel escalating the confusion via McManus's signature device of conspiratorial whispers delivered as "confidentially." McManus launched the strip in 1913, and his fluid Art Nouveau linework, ornate backgrounds, and precisely timed balloon placement helped codify the visual conventions that early comic-book artists would directly inherit.