Bringing Up Father — buf400210

Three panels follow Mrs. Jiggs and her daughter discussing a bottle purportedly from the Fountain of Youth in Saint Augustine; Jiggs has already drunk it thinking it ordinary water, and the strip closes with a hotel detective at the door reporting he is careening through the lobby on a bicycle with a peashooter. McManus draws his women in extravagant curled coiffures and pearl ropes, his men broad-shouldered and rubbery-faced, all set against crisp crosshatched interiors. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to sustain recurring characters across decades, its weekly gags helping establish the visual conventions—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, comedic timing through composition—that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide and that directly shaped the pamphlet comic books emerging in the late 1930s.