Bringing Up Father — buf430207f

Jiggs acquires a comfortable armchair from Dinty's, but finds every room in the house closed to him: the floor is being painted, his daughter has a bridge club, a restaurant won't seat him, and Maggie finally banishes the chair as too shabby for her lounge. McManus resolves the gag with Jiggs reading the paper beside the rejected chair, at peace with "the unrest of the rest of the world." The strip's clean ink line, expressive rubber-limbed figures, and rapid-fire panel rhythm exemplify the Sunday-page craft George McManus had refined since 1913 — the same visual grammar of recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panels that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide and that publishers soon bound into the first comic books.