Bringing Up Father — buf390608

Four daily panels follow Jiggs — the Irish immigrant social climber created by George McManus — as he comforts a crying boy, walks him around the block, exchanges pleasantries with a passing acquaintance ('Mr. Sid De Chap'), then wonders aloud what made the child cry again. The gag turns on the boy re-dissolving into tears the moment Jiggs tries to be encouraging. McManus's line is confident and economical: rounded figures, bold ink outlines, speech balloons cleanly integrated into the action. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, its daily and Sunday strips forming a direct bridge to the anthology comic books of the late 1930s, which reprinted exactly this kind of self-contained newspaper strip material before original content took over.