Bringing Up Father — buf400608

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-running recurring characters in American comics. This four-panel daily strip opens with two women consoling each other over an unspecified crisis, then cuts to a telephone call in which a son relays escalating disaster — sparks from a chimney fire have ignited the garage, which burned the car — delivered in the breathless run-on syntax McManus favored. The payoff: Jiggs has hung up because he has a golf date. McManus's clean line work, expressive rubber-faced figures, and rhythmic balloon placement helped codify the visual grammar — timed revelation, delayed punchline — that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic book anthologists of the late 1930s.