Bringing Up Father — buf400920

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper strips. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs—stout, black-suited, perpetually hapless—aboard a yacht. A slim figure asks him for help reaching the cabin; he grabs a rope or rail, loses his footing across three slapstick panels of pratfalls and stars, and lands in a heap, muttering, "I wonder what it is folks like about yachting?" McManus's draftsmanship is confident and loose: bold ink silhouettes, expressive speed-lines, neatly lettered speech balloons. The daily strip format—four panels, a single punchline—was the engine that trained American readers in sequential visual narrative long before the comic book existed as a separate object.