Bringing Up Father — buf400816

Four panels track a telephone gag: a caller asks Bimmy to check whether Jiggs is home; Bimmy puts the wire down and peers across the street; the third panel erupts in POW / CRASH / BANG sound effects as crockery and furniture fly through the roof of Jiggs's house; the deadpan payoff — "Yes — he's home — and so is his wife" — lands in panel four. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. His fluid brushwork, decorative Art Nouveau interiors, and rhythmic panel staging influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated newspaper strips — dailies and Sunday pages distributed to hundreds of papers simultaneously — directly seeded the first comic books, which were simply reprinted strip collections before original material emerged in the late 1930s.