Bringing Up Father — buf401128

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American social climber, as he pays off a man who sold his wife Maggie a worthless swamp parcel. The seller cheerfully hands over the deed, explaining the flooded land can be subdivided and marketed as a housing development—a neatly compressed real-estate con played for deadpan comedy. McManus's draftsmanship is instantly recognizable: rounded figures in ink-heavy outlines, elegant crosshatching on suits, and expressive hands doing much of the acting. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. Such King Features dailies—alongside Sunday pages by McManus, Herriman, and McCay—established the panel-by-panel sequencing and speech-balloon conventions that comic books, emerging in the mid-1930s as reprinted newspaper strips, inherited wholesale.