Bringing Up Father — buf401203

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by mid-century it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This four-panel daily strip follows the strip's central comic engine: Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American, outmaneuvered by the women around him. Here his wife praises their son-in-law's property deal as genius; the son-in-law deflects credit to Jiggs; Jiggs accepts the praise — then is reminded he must hand over the three-thousand-dollar profit he made. His final exclamation point balloon says everything. McManus's clean brushwork, confident figure-drawing, and expressive silhouettes exemplify the draftsmanship that made newspaper strips the laboratory where sequential art developed its grammar: regular panel grids, integrated speech balloons, and recurring characters whose faces readers recognized at a glance.