Bringing Up Father

Three panels follow Jiggs and his family preparing for a road trip through Kansas. In the opening panel Jiggs rhapsodizes about fields of corn and grass; the second and third panels erupt into a cacophony of roadside billboards — gas stations, hot-dog stands, tire shops, a Bar-B-Que — obliterating every trace of the scenery he promised. The joke lands in the final panel as someone in the car spots a sliver of grass beneath the sign clutter. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's clean ligne-claire linework, expressive figures, and mastery of visual pacing directly shaped the panel grammar that early comic-book artists absorbed wholesale from the newspaper page.