Bringing Up Father — buf400105

Four panels of George McManus's long-running daily strip follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American in top hat and checkered suit, striking up a conversation with a sailor in what the first panel identifies as Philadelphia near Independence Hall. The sailor, it emerges, is a man of spectacular domestic dispersal: alimony in St. Louis, a wife in Seattle, installments owed on an icebox in Memphis. When Jiggs confesses he hasn't been home to see his wife and her relatives in three years, the sailor asks if he's homesick — and Jiggs deadpans, *'Only when I'm home.'* A question mark in the final panel punctuates his gloom. McManus's clean brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and tight balloon placement exemplify the visual grammar that newspaper comic strips — Sunday pages from the 1890s onward — handed directly to the comic book form.