Bringing Up Father — buf390118

Four daily panels follow Jiggs as he discovers his friend 'Red' has renamed his establishment the Red Wood Cafe — formerly the Black Tree Inn. Inside, Jiggs notes the red chairs, red tablecloths, red napkins, red menu, and red-haired waiters, building to the punchline: 'Red' himself appears, his face flushed scarlet. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau linework and his locked-in gag structure — observation escalating panel by panel to a visual payoff — made the strip a global syndication phenomenon and a direct model for the anthology reprint comics that became the first true comic books in the 1930s.