Bringing Up Father — buf390726

Five panels follow Jiggs's working-class cronies lamenting that his wife Maggie and their newly titled daughter have made him too high-hat to eat with a fork or see old friends. Two pals walk to his downtown office to cheer him up; the strip closes on a disheveled Jiggs at a desk, hollow-eyed, answering 'Well — rather —' to their concern. McManus draws in a clean, round-line style — bold outlines, minimal crosshatching, expressive body language carrying the comedy. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 for King Features; by 1939 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. Strips like this one, syndicated daily and Sunday, supplied the page-layout conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that comic-book editors would directly inherit when the format migrated to newsstand pamphlets that same decade.