Bringing Up Father — buf390125

Four daily panels follow the long-suffering Jiggs dozing in an armchair while his wife Maggie conducts an interminable telephone conversation—"yes-dear, well, good-bye"—in the first panel. Jiggs sleeps through her approach in the second, snores on as she resumes a fresh gossip torrent in the third, and in the fourth simply mutters "What's the use?" *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus and syndicated from 1913, ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide. McManus's art—bold outlines, decorative dot-pattern fabrics, economical staging—helped establish the recurring-cast daily strip as a storytelling form. The strip's domestic-frustration loop, driven entirely by speech balloons and Z-snore iconography, shows how newspaper comics invented the visual shorthand that comic books would inherit wholesale.