Bringing Up Father — buf400912

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily finds Jiggs sneaking off on a boat while his wife Maggie searches the deck muttering about mischief. She decides he is merely meditating and leaves him undisturbed — but the final panel reveals Jiggs happily hauled up beside a rowboat full of drinking companions, one asking where the bottle opener is. McManus's line work is fluid and architectural: thick ruled borders, confident brushwork on the water, and expressive caricature faces. Strips like this one fed directly into the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper pages — the panel grid, speech balloon, and recurring cast that McManus helped standardize became the structural DNA of the medium.