Bringing Up Father — buf400530

Three panels: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant-made-good in his checkered suit and top hat, returns home carrying an armload of papers and magazines. A woman outside remarks he looks just like Margie; he mutters it's ridiculous to have a girl at a newsstand. Panel two shows him caught mid-flirtation, invoking the old saw about old fools. Panel three: he presents the papers to Maggie — his formidable wife — claiming he bought them thinking of her. Her response is a single-word balloon: WHAT? George McManus launched the strip in 1913, perfecting Art Nouveau linework and the recurring domestic warfare that made Jiggs and Maggie household names across two generations. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book format — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — assembled into anthology booklets through the 1930s.