Bringing Up Father — buf400221

Four panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant-made-good in top hat and checked suit — strolling Jackson Square, New Orleans, glad to have escaped Florida's fish stories. He encounters a man carrying an enormous fish and asks whether he caught it. The man flatly refuses to claim credit even if asked, then clarifies: the fish is his *bait*. McManus's line work is fluid and confident; his architecture and lampposts anchor each scene. George McManus (1884–1954) launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its decades-long run in hundreds of papers made Jiggs and Maggie among the most recognized comic characters worldwide — proof that the syndicated newspaper strip was the true incubator of recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and the visual shorthand that comic books would later inherit wholesale.