Bringing Up Father — buf401030

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irishman in checked suit and top hat, as he plots a quiet escape to Dinty Moore's tavern. He congratulates himself on sneaking out undetected — only to be intercepted by a neighbor relaying a message straight from Maggie: she already knows. The final panel's comic reversal is pure McManus timing. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American syndication. His clean Art Nouveau linework, elegant compositions, and mastery of the speech balloon influenced a generation of cartoonists. Strips like this one — printed in Sunday registers and daily editions nationwide — supplied the raw material that printers would soon repackage as the first comic books.