Bringing Up Father — buf400919

Four panels follow Jiggs and companions aboard a yacht as a city grocer, contacted by radio, air-drops a box of corned beef and cabbage from a low-flying plane — only for it to tumble straight down a smokestack into the engine room, where no one can retrieve it. George McManus draws his characters with bulbous noses, crisp ink outlines, and expressive rubber-limbed gestures that became shorthand for broad domestic comedy. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the longest-running American strips, its daily and Sunday pages syndicated worldwide. Those newspaper pages — with their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons — were the direct raw material reprinted and staple-bound into the first comic books of the 1930s, making strips like this one the literal origin of the medium.