Bringing Up Father — buf370704

Six panels follow Jiggs returning home after walking the dog Fifi, only to report that everyone in the park stopped to pet her, that he detoured through the Botanical Gardens — and that Fifi now has a pretzel clenched in her mouth and won't release it. McManus draws his characters in confident, economical ink line: the corpulent Maggie knitting, Jiggs in his battered top hat, a wide-eyed matron as straight-man. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. George McManus's clean contour work and his mastery of the recurring-cast domestic comedy directly shaped the visual conventions — stable panel grids, integrated speech balloons, character continuity — that daily strips exported wholesale into the first comic books of the 1930s.