Bringing Up Father — buf401015

Six panels follow Jiggs—George McManus's round, stiff-collared Irish-American social climber—visiting a hospitalized friend named Jerry. The gag turns on a hidden bottle of "nerve tonic" stashed in Jerry's coal-shed; Jerry's wife has already found it, and the strip closes with Jiggs tumbling headfirst into the shed to retrieve another. McManus's line work is clean and assured: expressive rubber-limbed figures, confident cross-hatching on backgrounds, speech balloons fitted neatly into each panel. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated by King Features from 1913, was among the earliest strips to reach a global audience and helped standardize the daily comic strip's grammar—sequential panels, recurring cast, balloon-driven dialogue—that would directly seed the comic book format of the 1930s.