Bringing Up Father — buf370710

Four daily panels follow Jiggs as he consults what appears to be a detective about finding his wife Maggie's lost dog, Fifi. He presents a photograph and details; the detective promises results; then the dog turns up on its own — only to ignore its own name entirely. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. McManus's line work here is characteristic: confident ink contours, cross-hatched shading on clothing, architecturally detailed interiors, and speech balloons deployed with comic rhythm across the gutter. Strips like this one — syndicated daily to hundreds of papers — are the direct precursors of the comic book: they standardized sequential panel grammar, recurring cast dynamics, and the gag-with-a-twist structure that would define the medium for a century.