Bringing Up Father — buf370313

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perennial Irish-American social climber, as he schemes to attend a coronation by cultivating a monocled acquaintance named Mr. Will Behere — a walking caricature of upper-crust aspiration. The gag turns on the monocle itself: Jiggs asks how long the man has worn one; "just about a week ago" comes the answer, puncturing every pretension. The final panel's dangling question mark is vintage McManus economy. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 and ran it for decades, its clean Art Nouveau contour lines and obsessive cross-hatching influencing a generation of cartoonists. The syndicated daily strip — alongside Hearst's Sunday pages — supplied the page-layout conventions, recurring characters, and balloon grammar that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and then imitated.