Bringing Up Father — buf390103

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly re-moneyed Irish immigrant, as he savors having half a million dollars in the bank — "when you have that much, you don't have to think." A boy at a desk punctures the mood: "Or is it?" Sure enough, a crowd of con men immediately descend, pitching a cribbage club, a dinner invitation, a gold mine, and an oil well. McManus's brushwork is confident and economical: dense cross-hatching on Jiggs's top hat and tailcoat, loose gestural figures in the crush of swindlers. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its recurring cast — Jiggs, Maggie, the social climbers — ran for decades, making it one of the longest newspaper strips in history. Daily strips like this one were the direct material that early comic-book publishers reprinted to launch the medium.