Bringing Up Father — buf370720

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's Irish-American social climber, dodging a phone call through his butler. The butler takes an elaborately deferential message — stacked repetitions of *sir* filling the balloon in a visual joke about servile speech — then relays it to a befuddled Jiggs, who demands to know who called. The final panel delivers the punchline via a wall-mounted phone exploding with star-burst lines: the caller's identity stuns him silent. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctly ornate for a daily strip — rounded figures, crosshatched suits, Art Deco interior details. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the longest-running American newspaper strips, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar helping establish conventions that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.