Bringing Up Father — buf370429

Four panels set aboard an ocean liner: a woman scans the horizon with binoculars, announcing she can see four palm trees; her husband, seated, notes they aren't due for days yet. In the third panel a figure peers around a doorway, question mark floating above him. The fourth panel erupts in laughter — someone has been staring at the captain's bald head through the binoculars. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate from 1913 until his death in 1954, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-running recurring characters in comics history. McManus's fluid line, elegant Art Deco interiors, and expressive reaction shots were widely influential on the visual shorthand — the floating punctuation, the sight-gag reversal — that daily strips bequeathed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.