Bringing Up Father — buf400816

Four panels track a telephone gag: a caller asks Bimmy to check whether Jiggs is home; Bimmy puts the wire down and peers across the street; the third panel erupts in POW / CRASH / BANG sound effects as crockery and furniture fly through the roof of Jiggs's house; the deadpan payoff — *"Yes — he's home — and so is his wife"* — lands in panel four. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His fluid brushwork, decorative Art Nouveau interiors, and rhythmic panel staging influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated newspaper strips — dailies and Sunday pages distributed to hundreds of papers simultaneously — directly seeded the first comic books, which were simply reprinted strip collections before original material emerged in the late 1930s.