Bringing Up Father — buf370430

Four panels aboard a ocean liner: Jiggs, McManus's perennial social-climbing Irishman, is locked in his stateroom by Maggie to keep him from the corned beef and cabbage on today's menu. Meanwhile two ship's officers confer in the galley, worried the crew will find none left — because a third tray has already vanished to the captain's quarters. The final panel delivers the punchline wordlessly, a question mark floating over the captain's head as he guiltily holds the tray. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. His clean Art Nouveau linework and mastery of the recurring-cast daily serial helped standardize the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, punchy final-panel gags — that newspaper comics passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.