Bringing Up Father — buf370531

Four panels follow the domestic sparring of Maggie and Jiggs, McManus's long-running Irish-American couple. Maggie reads a letter announcing their son is driving home from college and bringing his roommate as a surprise houseguest; Jiggs, seated and largely reactive, lands the punchline: if the roommate is as dumb as their son, it'll take more than both of them to make sense. McManus's line work is characteristically elegant — swooping dress hems, crosshatched shadows, expressive faces built on broad exaggeration. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally. George McManus helped standardize the daily comic strip's grammar: consistent recurring characters, compressed situation comedy across four panels, and speech balloons as primary narrative engine — conventions that fed directly into the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper strips.