Bringing Up Father — buf370722

Four panels follow the perpetually henpecked Jiggs and his butler James through a small domestic comedy: Jiggs muses aloud that iced tea would taste wonderful on a hot day; James agrees with practiced deference; Jiggs rhapsodizes over the ideal recipe — lemon, sugar — barely able to wait; then James returns empty-handed, and the punchline pivots on a simple miscommunication. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean ink line, architecturally solid interiors, and expressive silhouette figures influenced a generation of cartoonists. Daily strips like this one — syndicated to hundreds of papers — were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book, establishing the panel grid, speech balloon conventions, and recurring-character storytelling that defined the medium.