Bringing Up Father — buf400129

Four panels: a woman shows off her ski outfit to another, boasting it's the talk of St. Paul; her husband has slipped away to show off his own new ski gear. A child reads alone, muttering that ghost stories give him the creeps — whereupon a hulking figure in a vast fur coat and ski boots bursts through the door crying "Cheerio, old sock!" The joke lands on mistaken fright. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, chronicling Irish immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Running for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide, the strip refined the visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, slapstick timing — that Sunday newspaper pages carried directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.