Bringing Up Father — buf370824

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perennial social-climber in white tie, as he waves off his daughter's offer to help reload a camera, insisting he'll manage alone. He presses a button, film spools explosively into a room-filling tangle of ribbon, and he calls for rescue through a doorway nearly buried in the mess. The gag is pure domestic farce: male pride undone by technology. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its fluid Art Nouveau linework — sinuous furniture, patterned dresses, precise crosshatching — influenced a generation of cartoonists. Newspaper dailies like this one, syndicated coast to coast, supplied the repeating characters and sequential panel grammar that comic books inherited wholesale when they began reprinting strips in the early 1930s.