Bringing Up Father — buf400420

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* runs four panels: a woman at a table asks the top-hatted, cigar-smoking Jiggs to find someone to fix a broken trunk lock before they travel; Jiggs spots a workman outside and greets him warmly; the workman asks if Jiggs wants to go to work; Jiggs declines, preferring to find anything else to do, and settles happily on a bench. Clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and McManus's signature crosshatch waistcoats are all present. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and helped establish daily and Sunday newspaper comics as the direct precursor to the comic book format — recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons refined into a reliable weekly grammar that publishers would soon bind and sell as pamphlets.