Bringing Up Father — buf400311

George McManus's long-running daily strip follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman eternally at odds with his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this four-panel gag, Jiggs returns from a Washington FBI visit clutching a book J. Edgar Hoover gave him on law and crime; a companion quizzes him panel by panel until Jiggs concludes that Maggie's brother Danny should leave the country immediately. McManus's art is elegant — crosshatched suits, expressive rubber-faced figures, crisp speech balloons — rooted in the refined pen-line tradition he developed from 1913 onward. Strips like this one, syndicated to hundreds of papers simultaneously, supplied the ready-made page signatures that early comic-book publishers literally cut, repackaged, and sold as the first comic books in the early 1930s.