Bringing Up Father — buf370922

Four panels, black and white. A neighbor leaves her curly-haired daughter Frances with Jiggs, who reassures his wife Maggie that the child is playing safely upstairs — only for Frances to come sledding down the banister, bowling Jiggs over while he exclaims "I'm shot!" The strip closes with Jiggs barricaded behind a counter, vowing to stay put until the girl goes home. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for over four decades. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, his mastery of physical comedy across sequential panels, and his recurring cast of immigrants navigating nouveau-riche life helped establish the formal conventions — timed gag beats, expressive speech balloons, consistent character design — that newspaper comic strips handed directly to the first comic book publishers.