Bringing Up Father — buf400930

Four panels follow Mrs. Jiggs dropping unannounced into her husband's office building, where she confronts a young woman who declares herself Jiggs's secretary. The women trade terse words; Jiggs escapes with a breezy "So long!" and a dinner date at Dinty's. The final panel reveals the punchline: his wife *chose* the secretary herself, from a group of candidates. McManus's line work is fluid Art Deco — architectural hatching, expressive silhouettes, bold hats. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips with a fixed recurring cast and continuous domestic situation comedy. Its daily and Sunday pages, reproduced in early reprint booklets, directly seeded the comic book format publishers would commercialize by decade's end.