Bringing Up Father — buf390325

Three horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checked suit, and his perpetually exasperated wife Maggie. The gag turns on Jiggs's wife's brother being put to work mowing grass to earn borrowed money — only for the final panel to reveal him collapsed, apparently bribed to sleep on the job. McManus's line is clean and rounded, his characters broad-shouldered and rubbery, his speech balloons hand-lettered in confident capitals. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 with George McManus and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie among the most internationally syndicated characters in newspaper history. The daily strip format McManus mastered — recurring cast, compressed situation comedy, punchline final panel — was the direct template early comic-book publishers reprinted and then imitated when assembling the first pamphlet-format comics in the 1930s.