Bringing Up Father — buf401224

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber in top hat and checked suit, as a small dog latches onto his coattails and sends him stumbling at full sprint. The gag lands at a Turkish bath entrance, where a woman in a polka-dot swimsuit recoils and shouts 'Beast!' — mistaking the frantic arrival for aggression. McManus's brushwork is fluid and confident: thick outlines, hatched shadows, and figures caught mid-lurch convey pure kinetic comedy. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers for decades, and its recurring cast, speech balloons, and sequential panel rhythm helped standardize the visual language that daily strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.