Bringing Up Father — buf401104

Four panels follow the hapless Jiggs as he visits Mr. DeChap's office to propose a business partnership, only to learn the firm has just clawed its way out of the red — and that buying a bottle of black ink would plunge it straight back. McManus draws his characters in the rounded, rubber-limbed style he refined over decades: top hats, flustered gestures, and the exasperated silence of a question mark filling a speech balloon. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived American strips. Its recurring cast, panel-to-panel continuity, and integrated speech balloons were foundational conventions — Sunday pages like this one were the direct precursor to the comic book format that would explode in the late 1930s.