Bringing Up Father — buf390320

Four panels follow Jiggs, the round, tuxedoed Irish-American social climber of George McManus's long-running daily strip. A woman worries her brother never came home from work; a second character mutters that missing Maggie's meal is serious; a wide-brimmed stranger searches the neighborhood; the punchline lands on a man so spectacularly lazy that 'breathing is manual labor' — while the final panel shows him inert under a work lamp as trucks swerve around him. McManus's ligne claire draftsmanship — sinuous Art Nouveau borders, immaculate cross-hatching, expressive balloon lettering — set a visual standard for newspaper comics from 1913 onward. Strips like this one, syndicated nationally and later reprinted as pamphlets, directly seeded the comic-book format that would codify panel grids, recurring characters, and sequential storytelling as a commercial art form.