Bringing Up Father — buf430103f

George McManus's long-running strip follows the nouveau-riche Jiggs—top hat, checked suit, ever-present cigar—navigating the gap between his working-class instincts and his wife Maggie's social ambitions. In this Sunday page, Jiggs charms a crowd of children by offering his vacant lot for a clubhouse, phones his carpenter Casey to help them build it, and waxes sentimental about innocent youth—until the school principal arrives to report the kids demolished an entire school building for the bricks. Four tiers of panels move with brisk economy: street encounter, office phone call, domestic reverie, civic reckoning. McManus, who launched the strip in 1913, refined the Sunday-page format—symmetrical panel rows, expressive silhouette figures, and balloon placement that cues comedic timing—helping establish the visual conventions American comic books would inherit wholesale.