Bringing Up Father — buf390418

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American social climber, as a friend drags him to see a fantastical, gear-laden invention assembled on the spot. The machine grows panel by panel into an absurd tangle of cogs and pipes, the gag landing when the inventor admits he has no idea what it does or what it's for. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades in syndication worldwide. McManus's line work is instantly recognizable: rounded, confident brushwork, characters in top hats and tails, and machinery drawn with genuine mechanical affection. The strip helped codify the multi-panel daily format — sequential action, speech balloons carrying rhythm and timing — that fed directly into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.