Bringing Up Father — buf370728

Four panels follow Jiggs, the irascible Irish-American social climber, as he explodes about his butler's "Humpty Dumpty git-up," only to be silenced when the uniformed servant appears to offer iced tea. McManus draws the gag with clean ink lines, expressive caricature, and tight speech-balloon choreography — the butler's question mark balloon in the final panel delivering the punchline without a word. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for over four decades. Along with *Mutt and Jeff* and *Little Nemo*, these syndicated daily strips established the sequential visual grammar — recurring cast, panel rhythm, balloon placement — that directly shaped the comic book format when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.