Bringing Up Father — buf370807

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus in 1913, as he frets over a forgotten errand involving his butler, then navigates a back-and-forth with a younger figure about whether to telephone someone who "will be home all day." The gag turns on miscommunication compounding itself until Jiggs is left baffled in the final panel. McManus's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: fluid Art Nouveau outlines, expressive rubber-faced figures, and speech balloons integrated cleanly into the action. *Bringing Up Father* ran for over six decades and reached hundreds of papers worldwide, making it one of the longest-lived continuity-gag strips and a direct ancestor of the comic book format that packaged such dailies for newsstand sale.