Bringing Up Father — buf401211

Four panels by George McManus: young Dot asks Jiggs to play horsie; he deflects by sending her to phone a little friend; she rings up "Tiny," enthusiastically inviting him over — then shouts the punchline, *"An' bring yer rifle!"* leaving Jiggs aghast. McManus's linework is confident and fluid, his figures rooted in vaudeville caricature, his room settings dense with crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. It belongs to the generation of newspaper dailies and Sunday pages — Outcault, Dirks, McManus, Fisher — whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons invented the visual grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale.