Bringing Up Father — buf370721

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, as he schemes to sneak downtown for lunch rather than endure his wife Maggie's elaborate home menu. He mutters about the new butler being useless, calls for James, hears the full spread—soup, salad, onions, potatoes, chops, caviar, cheese, tea, cake, ice cream—then ends sprawled behind the sofa, stars flying, caught. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His art—fluid brush line, patterned black fills, expressive silhouettes—helped standardize the daily four-panel gag format that newspaper syndicates later repackaged into the first comic books of the 1930s.