Bringing Up Father — buf370305

Four panels by George McManus show the strip's central duo: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in waistcoat and spiky hair, and his imperious wife Maggie. Here Jiggs brags he gave the new janitor a piece of his mind, delivers some wisecrack about ducks, triggers loud banging noises, then reveals it was the janitor falling down stairs laughing. McManus's line is loose and confident—rounded figures, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons crisply integrated into the action. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally. Along with *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat*, it helped fix the visual grammar—recurring cast, sequential panels, balloon dialogue—that newspaper dailies handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.