Bringing Up Father — buf401219

Four panels: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running strip, discovers Maggie has cleaned out his trouser pockets, leaving him without carfare to Dinty's. His butler Jarvis explains a penny-bank scheme Maggie devised to collect his change. The third panel delivers the gag with a single large question mark—McManus's confident shorthand for wordless confusion. In the final panel Jiggs has apparently raided a bar's till, to the bartender's mild protest. McManus's line work is ornate and fluid, his women dressed in high-fashion filigree, his men broadly caricatured. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the newspaper strips whose daily and Sunday pages—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast—supplied both the format and the audience that made the comic book industry possible by the late 1930s.