Bringing Up Father — buf370324

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in newspaper history. This daily shows Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and white tie — cornered at a bar by a voluble Englishman who boasts of seeing the same London play forty times. Jiggs deflects with deadpan monosyllables until the final panel's rueful punchline lands on his own limited theatergoing patience. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: thick, confident brushwork, elegantly dressed figures, and speech balloons integrated naturally into each panel's architecture. Strips like this one are foundational artifacts — newspaper dailies were the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book, establishing the panel grid, recurring cast, and sequential gag structure that would migrate wholesale into print anthologies by the late 1930s.