Bringing Up Father — buf370817

Four panels follow Jiggs as he smuggles the family camera out of the house, walks to the office congratulating himself on finally having it to himself, opens the case at his desk — and finds it empty. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, eventually reaching an estimated 100 million readers in 46 countries. McManus's draftsmanship was unusually refined for the daily strip: clean art-deco linework, patterned waistcoats rendered with crosshatch precision, expressive silhouettes. The strip's domestic comedy — nouveau-riche Maggie versus her irrepressible husband Jiggs — ran continuously for decades, and its disciplined four-panel architecture helped fix the rhythmic grammar, punchline-in-panel-four structure that daily newspaper comics passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.