Bringing Up Father — buf400711

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-lived characters in newspaper comics. This daily strip opens with Jiggs—the stout, cigar-chomping Irish-American social climber—ordering his butler Meadows to retrieve his sofa from Maggie's brother's house, specifying everything that came with it: pillows and all. The movers comply literally, delivering the brother himself, asleep on the cushions. McManus renders the punchline with characteristic economy: three beats, clean crosshatching, and expressive body language that needs no caption. His fluid Art Nouveau-inflected line work and disciplined panel choreography exemplify the visual grammar newspaper artists invented—recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons—that directly seeded the comic book format emerging in these same years.