Bringing Up Father — buf390630

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, as he eagerly reaches for his infant son, insisting the baby adores his papa. Left alone with the child, he watches proudly—until the kid erupts in tears. A teenage boy then returns the wailing infant with a deadpan "Here, Dad, you can play with him now." McManus's line work is fluid and precise, his figures given weight through confident brushwork and restrained cross-hatching. Launched in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades across hundreds of newspapers worldwide, making it one of the earliest strips to demonstrate how recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons could sustain a serialized comic universe—the direct structural ancestor of the comic book page.