Bringing Up Father — buf390310

Three panels follow the hapless Jiggs through a backyard wood-delivery scheme: he's bought a cord of logs hoping Maggie's brother will see them uncut and stay away; two hours later the brother has simply gone home, and the punchline lands as Jiggs—napping in an armchair, a 'Z' floating above him—crashes through the window into the woodpile. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running gag strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau line, his passion for interior decoration, and his tight three-beat daily structure were enormously influential—newspaper dailies and Sunday pages like this one supplied the page-layout conventions, recurring characters, and speech-balloon grammar that the first comic books of the late 1930s directly inherited.