Bringing Up Father — buf400309

Six horizontal panels show Jiggs and a group of tuxedoed men at a formal Washington dinner, enduring a windbag politician's rambling speech. McManus builds the gag through accumulating audience commentary — "that same old speech again," "wake me up when it's my time to speak" — while the speaker drones on obliviously, his balloon text looping through committee platitudes. The draftsmanship is assured: thick brushwork, expressive caricature, figures rendered with the loose confidence of a cartoonist at full stride. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its Irish-immigrant social-climber premise ran for decades in syndication. Sunday pages like this one — self-contained gag strips with no cliff-hanger — formed the direct commercial model from which the first comic books, reprinting such newspaper material, were assembled in the early 1930s.