Bringing Up Father — buf371222

Four panels by George McManus track Jiggs caught between a nagging wife and an office full of admirers. In panels one and two his wife demands he fire his secretary; he hedges, promising she'll be gone in five minutes. Panel three shows him opening the door — and panel four erupts into a crowd of suitors bearing candy, show tickets, and lunch invitations, leaving Jiggs slack-jawed behind a question mark. McManus's line work is elegant and economical: thick ink outlines, crosshatched shadows, and expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the longest-running American daily strips, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar helping to establish conventions that early comic-book publishers would directly repackage from newspaper syndicate pages throughout the 1930s.