Bringing Up Father — buf371019

Four panels show Jiggs, McManus's perpetually put-upon social climber, tormented by a child playing opera on the radio for an hour. He considers bribing her with a dime, then upgrades to a quarter, asking her to turn it off. The punchline: she's glad he offered money because she didn't know *how* to turn it off herself. McManus draws in his characteristic art-nouveau-inflected line — elaborate wallpaper, candelabra, Jiggs's spiky hair — with speech balloons fully integrated into the panel architecture. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie internationally syndicated figures. Strips like this one, reprinted and collected into tabloid pamphlets from the 1910s onward, directly preceded and seeded the format that became the comic book.