Bringing Up Father — buf401119

Four panels follow Jiggs and a spiky-haired architect: Jiggs frets about oceanfront property his wife bought, the architect produces drawings, and the reveal lands when the plans turn out to resemble a yacht rather than a house. McManus's clean brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and neatly lettered speech balloons are textbook newspaper-strip craft. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for decades and was syndicated worldwide, making Jiggs and Maggie among the most recognized comic characters of the early twentieth century. The daily and Sunday strips McManus and his peers produced—Outcault, Dirks, Fisher—established the visual grammar that comic books, arriving in the 1930s as reprinted newspaper pages, inherited wholesale: the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast.