Bringing Up Father — buf371108

Four panels in George McManus's clean, art-deco-inflected line: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned reluctant millionaire, fumes in his armchair about his daughter's nightly absences, stomps up to lay down the law, then receives a phone call from her cheerfully announcing she needs him to escort her to the opera — because *Daddy* doesn't like to go. The final panel shows Jiggs, hat crushed to his head, listening in stunned silence while a question mark floats above him. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. Its recurring cast, fluid panel staging, and expressive speech balloons helped standardize the visual grammar that comic books — assembled reprints of exactly such dailies — would soon inherit wholesale.