Bringing Up Father — buf400131

Four panels trace a winter sidewalk argument between Jiggs and a well-dressed companion. The pair swap observations about Minneapolis snow, London fog, and an unnamed place foggier still — the punchline landing on "I do not know where it was." George McManus draws both men in top hats and heavy overcoats, his line work dense with crosshatching and confident ink blacks; speech balloons crowd the panels in the loose, confident hand he developed across four decades. McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and its unbroken daily-and-Sunday run made it one of the longest strips in syndication history. Those syndicated pages — formatted, cut, and bundled — were the direct material ancestor of the comic book, teaching readers worldwide to follow sequential panels left to right and trust the balloon to carry voice.