Bringing Up Father — buf390223

Four panels follow Jiggs through a domestic chain-reaction: Maggie sends him to build a fire, he discovers the chimney is blocked, climbs a ladder to clear it, and finds Maggie's brother already sitting atop the chimney — the strip's standard comic rhythm of thwarted male escape and marital friction. George McManus's line is clean and theatrical, figures broad-shouldered and rubbery, speech balloons clipped mid-sentence with dashes for breathless pacing. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally, making McManus among the first cartoonists to demonstrate that recurring newspaper-strip characters could sustain a franchise. Those syndicated dailies and Sunday pages were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their panel grids, sequential storytelling conventions, and speech-balloon grammar became the founding vocabulary of the medium.