Bringing Up Father — buf390712

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, as he navigates high-society encounters with characteristic bluster. In the opening panel he announces his intention to bring his son to meet a host's daughter; subsequent panels escalate through a butler's dry challenge, a pompous drawing-room introduction, and a final figure in evening dress delivering an arch invitation. McManus's line is elegant and precise — rounded figures, cross-hatched shadows, immaculate speech balloons with no wasted lettering. Bringing Up Father, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and exemplifies how the newspaper daily strip codified sequential-art grammar — consistent characters, panel-to-panel continuity, and dialogue-driven comedy — that directly seeded the comic-book format emerging in the same decade.