Bringing Up Father — buf370628

Four panels follow Jiggs, the round-faced Irish-American social climber in top hat and checkered vest, walking a comically tiny, wire-thin dog. Exhausted, he sits on a park bench — only for a woman to offer him charity, producing the punchline: sixty-two cents. McManus's line work is economical and fluid, his cityscapes sketched in confident shorthand. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie internationally syndicated fixtures. The daily newspaper strip — not the comic book — invented the medium's core grammar: sequential panels, speech balloons anchored to characters, recurring casts, and the single-page comedic rhythm that early comic-book publishers would simply reprint and repackage wholesale.