Bringing Up Father — buf400423

Three panels, black and white. Jiggs, the stout Irish-American social climber in top hat and checked suit, walks with a taller companion. Someone has apparently picked Jiggs's pocket; the companion finds this hilarious. By the third panel, stars burst around Jiggs's head as he lies flattened on the ground — the punchline landed physically. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for over four decades. Its clean brushwork, architectural backgrounds, and rhythmic panel-to-panel momentum helped standardize the visual grammar that daily strips exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s — reprinted newspaper pages, stapled and sold at newsstands, that gave the medium its name and its format.