Bringing Up Father — buf390921

Four horizontal panels follow Maggie and Jiggs, George McManus's long-running couple from Irish-immigrant society. Here Maggie frets that her English husband hasn't embraced Palm Springs; Jiggs hatches a plan to dress him in Western gear and drag him into town. The final panel delivers the punchline: a figure bursts through the door already costumed in full cowboy regalia, hollering frontier slang. McManus's line is fluid and elegant — rounded figures, crosshatched interiors, confident brushwork on the door-frame gag. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, its speech-balloon rhythm and recurring-character format directly modeling the grammar that newspaper strips handed wholesale to the nascent comic-book industry of the late 1930s.