Bringing Up Father — buf400910

Three panels track Irish-American social climber Jiggs aboard a yacht. His companions explain he loves yachting for the "lighthouses and shore-lines"—the punchline being the crowded beach of sunbathing women he's ogling through a telescope. McManus's line is clean and assured: crisp nautical costumes, elegantly rendered female figures in the final wide panel, speech balloons integrated seamlessly into the action. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the longest-running and most widely syndicated strips in American newspaper history. McManus refined the visual conventions—consistent recurring characters, panel-to-panel continuity, expressive staging—that Sunday comics pages exported worldwide and that early comic-book publishers directly reprinted, making strips like this one the literal raw material from which the comic-book medium was assembled.