Bringing Up Father — buf400213

George McManus's long-running daily strip follows Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman in top hat and checked suit, through a four-panel beach-day gag: he promises to meet some women at the bathing beach wearing his new suit, struts past them obliviously while they watch, then perches alone on a post waiting. The punchline is entirely visual — the suit never appears on the women's terms, only on his. McManus's line is confident and fluid, his figures broad and expressive. *Bringing Up Father* (launched 1913) was one of the strips whose Sunday pages, syndicated coast to coast, established the sequential visual grammar — recurring cast, speech balloons, panel-to-panel cause and effect — that comic book editors would simply bind and sell within a decade.