Bringing Up Father — buf390708

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running *Bringing Up Father* (launched 1913), as he tries to quiet a crying baby by borrowing a neighbor's child to play with it. Mrs. Bratts sends young Ethel, described as "bright"; Ethel promptly asks why Jiggs's nose is red, the two toddlers trade nonsense syllables, then erupt into howling chaos — ending with Jiggs phoning Mrs. Bratts to collect her daughter. McManus's linework is elegantly curvilinear, his interiors dressed with Art Deco precision. *Bringing Up Father* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, and strips like this one — self-contained daily gags with consistent recurring characters and speech balloons driving all comedy — were the direct template from which the first comic books, reprinting such newspaper pages, emerged in the early 1930s.