Bringing Up Father — buf370730

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie debating a country-camp site, then cut indoors where their butler stands hollow-eyed with dread. Jiggs announces the family will drag him along to the hunt; the butler's expression collapses into horror. The final panel delivers the punchline: he is still scratching mosquito bites from last year's trip. George McManus drew Bringing Up Father from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's elegantly thin line, Art Nouveau interior flourishes, and tight four-panel daily rhythm were widely imitated. Strips like this one—mass-printed, nationally distributed dailies—supplied both the page format and the visual grammar (panels, speech balloons, recurring cast) that early comic-book publishers directly reprinted to launch the medium.