Bringing Up Father — buf371119

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the recurring gag of Jiggs dodging social obligations: a secretary stalls a caller named Dick Tograph, insisting Jiggs is out; Jiggs himself then bursts in from the opposite direction, cane swinging, top hat askew — only to find Tograph waiting at his home, demanding fifty dollars owed. McManus draws in a fluid Art Deco line, his figures loose and rubbery, the staging purely cinematic. Strips like this one — syndicated to hundreds of papers simultaneously — established the daily comic as mass visual literature and the recurring-character serial as a storytelling form that would directly seed the comic book format of the late 1930s.