Bringing Up Father — buf370429

Four panels set aboard an ocean liner: a woman scans the horizon with binoculars, announcing she can see four palm trees; her husband, seated, notes they aren't due for days yet. In the third panel a figure peers around a doorway, question mark floating above him. The fourth panel erupts in laughter — someone has been staring at the captain's bald head through the binoculars. George McManus drew Bringing Up Father for King Features Syndicate from 1913 until his death in 1954, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-running recurring characters in comics history. McManus's fluid line, elegant Art Deco interiors, and expressive reaction shots were widely influential on the visual shorthand — the floating punctuation, the sight-gag reversal — that daily strips bequeathed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.