Bringing Up Father — buf400907

Three panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber created by George McManus in 1913, as he waits on a yacht deck for Maggie to finish her hour-long bath. His daughter explains the queue of bathers; Jiggs laments that every night feels like Saturday on this yacht; in the final panel he is cheerfully drenched by a deck hose and calls for another bar of soap. McManus's linework is ornate—Jiggs wears his trademark playing-card-patterned robe—and the balloon lettering is hand-rendered with confident authority. Sunday strips like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book: their recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons established the visual grammar that publishers would collect into newsprint pamphlets throughout the 1930s, inaugurating the American comic book as a distinct commercial form.