Bringing Up Father — buf370914

Four panels track a sharp comic reversal: a businessman congratulates himself by telephone on closing a massive merchandise order, then boasts to a colleague that the contract will clean out his supplier's entire stock — only for the top-hatted Jiggs to stroll in and cheerfully announce he has just *bought* that same firm. "What?" ends the strip in pure deflation. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running gag strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean art deco linework, arch-browed characters, and tight four-panel rhythm exemplify the daily newspaper strip format whose conventions — speech balloons, sequential panels, recurring cast — directly seeded the first comic books of the 1930s, which were initially nothing more than reprinted newspaper pages.