Bringing Up Father — buf390412

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs — the Irish immigrant social climber in top hat and morning coat — through a parlor conversation. A sharp-suited stranger peppers him with questions; Jiggs admits he is searching for a long-lost cousin last seen in Africa when the cousin was two years old. The gag pivots on a deadpan punchline: Jiggs is not lost, merely *loose*. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. McManus refined the speech-balloon grammar and panel-to-panel comic timing that syndicated daily strips exported worldwide, directly supplying the page layouts and reprint formats from which the first comic books — literally assembled from newspaper pages — were built.