Bringing Up Father — buf370929

Four panels follow the long-suffering Jiggs, bandaged foot elevated, as his wife Maggie abandons her errand to fetch the doctor and detours to a fabric sale instead. The gag turns on misdirection: Maggie's supposed mission collapses the moment a 'SALE' sign appears, and Jiggs is left alone, ruefully concluding she has 'gone around the world.' McManus draws in his characteristic art-deco mode — sinuous women in fashionable dress, rounded furniture, confident brush linework. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips to build genuine serial characterization; its recurring domestic war between the social-climbing Maggie and the earthy Jiggs supplied a template that shaped American comic strips, and eventually comic books, for decades.