Bringing Up Father — buf370923

Four daily panels by George McManus show Jiggs hobbling through a gout flare: in panel one he clutches his aching foot; in panel two he soaks it, sighing relief; a servant opens the door in panel three; panel four lands him sprawled across the room, stars bursting from the impact, as his wife explains she kicked him with the very foot supposedly afflicted. McManus's line is clean and elastic—rounded bodies, bold blacks, expressive stars for pain—hallmarks of the fluid draftsmanship he developed across four decades. Bringing Up Father, syndicated from 1913 by King Features, was among the strips whose collected reprints became proto-comic books, proving recurring characters and sequential panels could sustain a mass readership far beyond the daily page.