Bringing Up Father — buf340816OA

Three panels track a sunlit social comedy: a woman in a wide-brimmed hat recounts to a seated friend how an old fool at the pier flirted with her and walked straight into the water — then arrives home to find that fool is her husband Jiggs, dripping in his armchair. George McManus's linework is unmistakable: elegant hatching, exaggerated rubber-limbed figures, and clothing rendered with a fashion illustrator's precision. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first daily strips to build a stable cast and continuous domestic situation, the very model newspaper syndicates exported worldwide. McManus's mastery of the speech-balloon gag — punchline withheld until the final panel — codified the three-beat rhythm that comic books would later inherit wholesale.