Bringing Up Father — buf370802

Four daily panels by George McManus show Jiggs dispatched by his imperious wife Maggie to discipline the butler James for serving corned beef and cabbage — again. Jiggs obliges, solemnly instructing James to go fetch the ingredients from the store. The final panel reveals Jiggs at the table, gleefully anticipating exactly the dish Maggie forbade. McManus's line is fluid and confident: rounded figures, patterned dress rendered with dense crosshatch, a staircase setting that recurs across decades of the strip. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and helped standardize the daily comic strip's panel grammar — sequential boxes, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast whose social dynamics reset each installment, the template every subsequent comic strip inherited.