Bringing Up Father — buf391025

Three panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running daily strip — checking into a Pueblo hotel where the desk clerk recognizes him: his son stayed ten weeks and skipped the bill. The gag lands in the final panel with an exclamation point and a ledger shoved forward. McManus's line work is instantly recognizable: art-nouveau curlicues on furniture, crosshatched suits, figures drawn with rubbery expressiveness. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar helping establish conventions that newspaper strips passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.