Bringing Up Father — buf390313

Four panels follow Jiggs and a neighbor discussing Maggie's brother Horace, newly hired as a water-carrier on a construction site. The gag turns on Horace's laziness: he reportedly telephoned the foreman to announce lunchtime because he lacked a watch — then the final panel reveals him asleep atop a steel beam, a snoring 'Z' floating above him. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his cityscapes rendered with architectural precision against broad comedic timing. Bringing Up Father, created by George McManus and syndicated from 1913, ran for decades as one of the longest-lived American comic strips, its domestic comedy and consistent cast helping establish the recurring-character daily strip as a commercial and artistic form whose page layouts directly seeded the first comic books of the late 1930s.