Bringing Up Father — buf400208

Three panels show Jiggs and a companion fishing from a small boat in Florida waters. A hooked fish drags their line — and the boat — out to sea; a man leaning from a passing ship's stern delivers the punchline, noting their cord is tangled in his propeller, pulling them toward Cape Horn. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid: chunky figures, expressive postures, and clean speech balloons carry the gag without a wasted line. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the longest-running and most internationally distributed strips of the century. Strips like it — printed as Sunday pages and daily sequences — supplied the direct template for the comic book format: sequential panels, recurring cast, and the visual grammar that would define the medium.