Bringing Up Father — buf371111

Four panels follow Jiggs and his household maid Hilda through a comic misunderstanding: Hilda has spent the day in the attic sorting belongings, burning what she deems useless — including the rolling pin Jiggs has secretly been trying to hide from his sharp-tongued wife Maggie. The final panel lands the punchline as Jiggs nervously watches the bonfire. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American comics history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework and his recurring cast of working-class Irish immigrants navigating new money established conventions — the recurring cast, the strip-long build to a single gag — that newspaper dailies exported directly into the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.