Bringing Up Father — buf390313

Four panels follow Jiggs and a neighbor discussing Maggie's brother Horace, newly hired as a water-carrier on a construction site. The gag turns on Horace's laziness: he reportedly telephoned the foreman to announce lunchtime because he lacked a watch — then the final panel reveals him asleep atop a steel beam, a snoring 'Z' floating above him. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his cityscapes rendered with architectural precision against broad comedic timing. *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus and syndicated from 1913, ran for decades as one of the longest-lived American comic strips, its domestic comedy and consistent cast helping establish the recurring-character daily strip as a commercial and artistic form whose page layouts directly seeded the first comic books of the late 1930s.