Bringing Up Father — buf371122

Four panels, black ink line on white stock: a salesman calls on Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber created by George McManus in 1913, representing both a radio company and a piano company. The gag turns on Mrs. Jiggs's singing lessons irritating neighbors for ten blocks — her teacher, it emerges, is the salesman's own friend — until Jiggs apparently kicks the man, hobbling himself in the final panel amid McManus's characteristic burst-star impact lines. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: Art Nouveau–inflected furniture, crisp speech balloons, and pantomime facial expressions. *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived daily strips and a direct ancestor of the comic book page — its panel sequencing and balloon grammar trained generations of readers in the visual language that would define the medium.