Bringing Up Father — buf400513

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip follows the gag in tight sequence: a ranch hand brags he can rope anything with a lariat, hurls it toward the Horn-In Café, and snares not a cowboy but Jiggs — the strip's perennial Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checked suit — who sputters his trademark greeting to Maggie. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: fluid ink line, confident figures, and speech balloons that pace the joke like a drummer's rimshot. Strips like this one are primary documents of the visual grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated lettering — that newspaper pages handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.