Bringing Up Father — buf430718f

George McManus's long-running strip follows Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he and his neighbors scheme to plant a Victory Garden — only for his wife Maggie to chase him off their property with a spade. Jiggs retreats to use pal Clancy's yard instead, assembles a gang of men with shovels, hoes, and rakes, and the final panels dissolve into cheerful chaos, mud, and a cabbage patch. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident: rounded figures, deco-inflected architecture, and speech balloons whose casual vernacular dialogue drives every gag. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips to establish the recurring domestic-comedy format — episodic, character-driven, visually self-contained — that directly shaped the early comic book's page grammar.