Bringing Up Father — buf370524

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a household crisis of unpaid bills. In panel one, two figures wade through drifts of paper, noting the pile won't reach Jiggs's own bills until eight o'clock. Panel two has a dapper, top-hatted Jiggs striding away, monocle in place, lamenting he won't have enough left to buy a newspaper. Panel three, he resolves to tell Maggie they must economize. Panel four, Maggie — already buried in her own mountain of correspondence — airily delegates the whole mess back to Jiggs. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, pioneering the recurring-character domestic strip whose panel-and-balloon grammar directly seeded the comic-book page.