Bringing Up Father — buf390616

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he waits an eternity for a waiter named Tubhead to bring his lunch order — a little fish with liver. The gag builds through mounting impatience, a servant sliding down the banister, and a punchline about a future football player. McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: thick ink contours, ornate interior backgrounds, and expressive rubber-limbed figures. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in Hearst syndication, reaching millions of readers daily. Such newspaper comic strips — with their repeating characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons — directly established the visual conventions that 1930s publishers then collected into the first comic books.