Bringing Up Father — buf390419

Six panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in top hat and tails, through a domestic comedy of lateness and hunger. A visitor wakes him at ten o'clock; he frets in bed about a tardy employee he wants to fire; then, meeting his boss, he uses his brother as a cover story for being late himself. The strip closes with both men realizing it is lunchtime and neither knows where to eat — punctuated by a floating question mark. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades in King Features syndication. His clean ink line, ornate interiors, and expressive balloon lettering refined the daily-strip grammar that newspaper pages had been building since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s — the direct ancestor of the comic-book page.