Bringing Up Father — buf400805

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American bricklayer turned millionaire, sweating through a summer heat wave. He staggers home complaining someone will beat him to announcing the temperature, hunts the house for a cool spot, gets mistaken for his imperious wife Maggie by a passerby, then discovers the coolest place available: the refrigerator — stepping inside and shutting the door. McManus's draftsmanship is ornate yet precise: cross-hatched checked suits, confident ink line, expressive figure work. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran continuously for decades, its recurring cast and gag-per-strip rhythm helping establish the daily newspaper strip as the direct ancestor of the comic book format — standardized panels, integrated speech balloons, and a serialized character readers returned to each morning.