Bringing Up Father

Six horizontal panels follow Jiggs's failed bid to slip out and visit pal Dinty Moore. Maggie refuses, then a visitor—Miss Jones—appears at the door, giving Maggie a social errand to run instead. The strip closes with Maggie dispatching Jiggs to Dinty Moore's on her own terms. McManus draws his women in extravagant ruffled skirts and elaborate hats, the men squat and rumpled beside them—a visual shorthand audiences read instantly. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, reaching millions of daily readers. McManus refined the newspaper strip's core machinery: recurring cast, compressed scene-setting in panel one, escalating reversal, punch in the final beat. Those dailies and Sunday pages, stacked and stapled by hand in the 1930s, became the first comic books.