Bringing Up Father — buf391022

Four panels follow Jiggs and his wife checking into a Pueblo hotel, where the desk clerk recognizes their son's unpaid bill — the final panel lands the punchline with a silent exclamation point. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913 until his death in 1954, his art distinguished by Art Nouveau curlicues, checkerboard floors, and crisply caricatured figures in formal dress. The strip ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, making Jiggs one of the most recognized comic characters of the early twentieth century. Daily strips like this one — self-contained gag units with recurring cast — were the direct template from which comic books were assembled and sold beginning in the mid-1930s, reprinting newspaper pages before original material took over the format entirely.