Bringing Up Father — buf370420

Four daily panels by George McManus follow Jiggs and his wife Maggie aboard what appears to be an ocean liner with a swimming pool. Maggie, in a swimsuit and carrying an umbrella, insists on avoiding suntan; Jiggs, in his signature top hat and tuxedo, reluctantly agrees to do as the other passengers do — the final panel reveals him running in swim trunks, umbrella aloft, worried about his nose turning red. McManus's crisp brush line and expressive caricature typify the *Bringing Up Father* strip, which launched in 1913 and ran for decades. Such daily strips, syndicated nationally, were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics of the 1930s would collect and sell as a new medium.