Bringing Up Father — buf400417

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie as their son-in-law slips out early to scout Oklahoma City oil fields, leaving the couple to wonder where he's gone. The strip closes at the Owl Diner — *Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Open All Night* — where a top-hatted Jiggs has apparently been sitting for five hours waiting to be served. George McManus's line work is elegant and architectural: cross-hatched interiors, confident brushwork on the diner exterior, expressive figures built from economical curves. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest strips to establish the recurring domestic-comedy format — fixed characters, escalating misunderstanding, punchline panel — conventions that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide and that proto-comic-book reprint anthologies then codified into the medium's foundational grammar.