Bringing Up Father — buf400716

Four panels follow the harried Jiggs — blocky, cigar-chomping, dressed in a striped shirt — as he decides to tackle paperwork at home rather than his interrupted office, only to be ambushed by his imperious wife Maggie, who immediately redirects him to supervise house painters. The final panel's question mark above the painters' heads lands the gag cleanly. McManus's line work is fluid and economical: rounded figures, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons that carry the whole comic load without a narrator in sight. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived newspaper strips ever produced. McManus helped standardize the sequential panel grid and the recurring-character domestic comedy format that syndicates would export worldwide — and that comic-book publishers would directly inherit when they began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.