Bringing Up Father — buf390224

Four panels show a heavyset man outside discovering chimney smoke filling the house, then dozing off mid-thought on a ladder, then rationalizing the sleeper inside as a 'sleepy loafer,' then calling to Maggie for his shotgun — only to tumble dramatically off-panel. The strip is *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus and syndicated from 1913, featuring the social-climbing Irish immigrant Jiggs and his formidable wife Maggie. McManus's linework is elegant and fluid, his sight gags timed across panels with cinematic precision. Strips like this one — daily and Sunday — were the direct precursors of the comic book: packaged reprints of newspaper comics became the first comic books sold on newsstands in the early 1930s, making McManus and his contemporaries the unwitting architects of an entire medium.