Bringing Up Father — buf400724

Four panels: a man confesses to Mr. Jiggs that working in a boiler factory prepared him for secretary work; an offscreen crash prompts "What's that noise?"; the third panel erupts in musical notes as a woman sings at the piano; Jiggs retreats, deciding the factory was quieter. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, running it until his death in 1954 — one of the longest-lived gag strips in American syndication. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework and domestic comedy formula directly fed the early comic-book reprint industry: 1930s tabloid-format collections of newspaper strips, sold on newsstands, were the immediate ancestor of the comic book as a commercial object.