Bringing Up Father — buf390321

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in top hat, as he fields complaints about a sleeping worker—Maggie's brother—on a job site. The gag builds through misunderstanding: the foreman, it turns out, is himself asleep at his desk, leaving Jiggs gesturing at a large question mark. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. McManus's fluid Art Nouveau linework—decorative wallpaper, elegant furniture, expressive silhouettes—gave the strip a visual sophistication rare in daily comics. Strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: newsprint pages, sequential panels, and speech balloons refined by McManus and his contemporaries became the grammar every comic artist inherited.