Bringing Up Father — buf390106

Four panels follow a top-hatted social climber arriving at the newly wealthy Jiggs household to announce his matrimonial intentions toward the daughter—only to be routed by the cigar-chomping Jiggs himself, who dispatches him with a blunt accounting of debts owed and a pointed remark that his daughter's future husband had better have ten million dollars. The final panel delivers the comic reversal: the suitor collapses, gasping he never felt so well in his life as he did before he walked in. George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for decades in syndication, its clean ink line and expressive balloon lettering helping standardize the visual conventions—panel gutters, reaction beats, punchline final frame—that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic book compilers of the 1930s.