Bringing Up Father — buf370512

A single wide daily strip by George McManus shows Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in his trademark checked suit, squeezed into a dense crowd straining to watch a coronation procession. Packed shoulder-to-shoulder with top-hatted spectators, he can see nothing, and his speech balloon delivers the punchline: back home at Dinty Moore's he was always closer to the action. One figure watches smugly from a pedestal at right. McManus's draftsmanship is all confident cross-hatching and caricatured bulk; the crowd itself becomes the visual joke. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the earliest strips to anchor its comedy in a fixed recurring cast—establishing the serial character logic that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.