Bringing Up Father — buf401205

Three panels follow Jiggs and Maggie: she announces her brother Jim is learning tuba and will be "the envy of everyone in his neighborhood"; Jiggs deflates the boast noting Jim never does any work; the wide center panel shows a street of houses plastered with FOR SALE and FOR RENT signs, neighbors fleeing the racket, a small dog mid-flight; the final panel finds Jiggs rueful — Jim has neither friends nor enemies left. McManus's draftsmanship is confident and dense, the architecture panel functioning almost as a single-panel gag. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, making it one of the longest continuous strips in history. Its recurring cast and strip-to-strip continuity helped establish the conventions — speech balloons, panel sequence, week-to-week character identity — that newspaper funny pages passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.