Bringing Up Father — buf370616

Four panels by George McManus follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American patriarch, in a telephone farce. His boss grumbles that his son hasn't shown up in five days and he'd love to fire him — then the son calls in late, blaming a freight-car collision as 'a slight accident.' Father and son trade evasions about 'getting down to business,' neither willing to admit the obvious. McManus's line work is fluid and elegant: Jiggs's round frame and the son's spiky hair are rendered with confident brushwork. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first daily strips syndicated nationwide, helping establish the recurring-character serial comic as a mass medium — the direct precursor to the comic book format that would crystallize by decade's end.