Bringing Up Father — buf391125

Three panels follow Jiggs, the henpecked Irish-American social climber, trapped indoors while wife Maggie monitors his every move by telephone. A chance encounter on a Chicago construction beam — a worker named Dinny, in town two days before the National Police Convention — gives the gag its punchline: Jiggs, reached by phone, ruefully wishes he could join his old friend. McManus draws with confident brushwork, theatrical staging, and the clean balloon lettering that defined newspaper comic craft. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 under George McManus for King Features Syndicate, running continuously for decades. These daily strips, reprinted and stapled into pamphlets through the 1930s, were the literal raw material from which the American comic book format was assembled.