Bringing Up Father — buf371016

Four panels track Jiggs's ordeal with an off-key singer: a woman belts operatic nonsense syllables while a conductor begs for *crescendo*; a bemused Jiggs in the next room wonders how long the caterwauling will last; fed up, he storms out only to discover the noise is a genuine hog-caller at work, whose bellow has left him stone deaf—the strip's punchline delivered entirely through shouted misunderstanding. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and tightly sequenced daily panels helped codify the visual grammar—recurring cast, cliffhanger rhythm, speech balloon as character voice—that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide and that early comic-book editors would simply reprint, making the daily strip the direct ancestor of the comic-book page.