Bringing Up Father — buf390419

Six panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in top hat and tails, through a domestic comedy of lateness and hunger. A visitor wakes him at ten o'clock; he frets in bed about a tardy employee he wants to fire; then, meeting his boss, he uses his brother as a cover story for being late himself. The strip closes with both men realizing it is lunchtime and neither knows where to eat — punctuated by a floating question mark. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, running it for decades in King Features syndication. His clean ink line, ornate interiors, and expressive balloon lettering refined the daily-strip grammar that newspaper pages had been building since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s — the direct ancestor of the comic-book page.