Bringing Up Father — buf371231

Four panels follow Jiggs arriving at the office at noon, greeted by a boss who notes it's "a fine time to show up for work." Jiggs deflects with cheerful obliviousness — it's twelve noon, he says, good morning or is it? — then explains the hour away by announcing he just had breakfast. The final panel closes on a baffled question mark. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. His elegant Art Nouveau line work — fluid figures, decorative interiors, precise crosshatching — gave the strip a visual sophistication that distinguished it from rougher contemporaries. These daily newspaper strips, alongside Sunday pages, supplied the page layouts, recurring characters, and speech-balloon conventions that American comic books directly inherited when anthology publishers began reprinting them in the early 1930s.