Bringing Up Father — buf390621

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus, as he meets Lord Worthnotten. The nobleman recalls Jiggs's grandson fondly and muses that the boy might one day marry into the nobility — "who knows?" McManus's line work is immediately recognizable: elegantly dressed figures with exaggerated round heads, cross-hatched suits, and fluid ink curves that owe something to Art Nouveau. Speech balloons carry the entire comedic load across the panels with no captions. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, its daily and Sunday strips among the formats that directly seeded the first comic books — reprints of exactly such newspaper pages, stapled and sold on newsstands from the early 1930s onward.