Bringing Up Father — buf371025

Four panels follow two tuxedoed fathers comparing letters from their college-age sons. One invited neighbor Ken Nedicutt over for fatherly advice; both have just received long letters from their boys — and both mailed checks moments ago. The first father's wry concern: college teaches young men to forget everything except football. The punchline lands with a single exclamation point when the second father confesses he hopes his son is the football team's cheerleader. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-running comic-strip characters in syndication history. McManus's fluid ink line and economical panel-to-panel staging exemplify the daily newspaper strip form that directly seeded the first comic books, which were initially reprints of exactly this material.