Bringing Up Father — buf390227

Four panels follow Jiggs through a darkly comic errand: his sister, worried he hasn't risen, sends him to check on her brother; a silhouetted figure is shown collapsed on stairs; Jiggs phones the doctor; the final panel reveals the man asleep in the doctor's office, snoring so convincingly the physician thought him dead. McManus's brushwork is confident and economical — heavy blacks, hatched shadows, expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father*, launched by George McManus in 1913, ran for decades in syndication and shaped the visual language American comics inherited: recurring cast, compressed situation comedy, and speech balloons carrying the entire narrative load. These daily strips, printed in millions of newspapers simultaneously, were the direct seedbed from which the comic book format grew.