Bringing Up Father — buf370624

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber, caught in a familiar bind: his wife Maggie berates their son for laziness while Jiggs—still in bed—privately panics, realizing his own four-day office absence is about to be exposed. The gag turns on the son's cheerful ignorance saving Jiggs from Maggie's wrath, at least momentarily. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: fluid brushwork, patterned wallpaper, expressive hair. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran continuously for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. These syndicated daily strips—alongside *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat*—established the recurring-character serial format and perfected speech-balloon grammar that publishers would soon bind into the first comic books.