Bringing Up Father — buf400130

Four panels track Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber created by George McManus, trudging through a St. Paul blizzard, then arguing with a hotel bellboy over a stone-cold radiator. The gag builds economically: Jiggs grumbles about Maggie's frozen voice, touches the useless radiator, rings for help, and gets thrown out with a pitcher of ice water. McManus's draftsmanship is precise — crosshatched snowdrifts, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons that carry the comic timing. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide. Sunday strips like this one were the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book: recurring characters, sequential panels, and balloon dialogue — tools McManus and his contemporaries essentially codified.