Bringing Up Father — buf370605

Four panels follow Jiggs being scolded by his socially ambitious wife Maggie for taking his stenographer to lunch. He deflects — "he takes after me, not his mother" — then discovers his son has ordered lunch for two served *in* his office, prompting a waiter's deadpan punchline about seating. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: spiky hair, exaggerated posture, minimal backgrounds sharpening each comic beat. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its recurring domestic power struggle made it one of the longest-running and most internationally syndicated strips in history. Such dailies were the direct precursors to the comic book format — reprint collections of newspaper strips like this one literally *were* the first comic books sold on American newsstands in the early 1930s.