Bringing Up Father — buf390511

Four daily panels follow Maggie and Jiggs through a domestic exchange that turns on a single comic pivot: Maggie cheerfully announces her brother Waldere will join them to meet the new baby, prompting Jiggs's dry aside — *"Yes — but I was just thinkin'"* — capped by his punchline wondering what will happen *when the baby looks at him.* McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: Maggie's elaborate coiffure and patterned dress rendered with Art Nouveau fluency, Jiggs blocky and rumpled beside her. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century, its recurring characters and gag-per-strip rhythm helping establish the structural conventions — panel sequence, speech balloons, visual shorthand — that newspaper syndicates exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.