Bringing Up Father — buf370417

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. This daily, dated April 17, 1937, and syndicated by King Features, follows the eternal social climber Jiggs, who in four brisk panels rhapsodizes about escaping city life for the sea—only to be bowled over by a cyclist, flattened by a tumbling barrel of water, and doused entirely. The strip's physical comedy escalates panel to panel in McManus's clean, art-deco-inflected line: rounded figures, bold blacks, and stars-and-sparks impact marks that became standard visual shorthand across the medium. McManus helped codify the recurring-character daily strip format whose accumulated episodes, collected and reprinted, directly seeded the first comic books of the 1930s.