Bringing Up Father

Six panels follow Maggie dragging her reluctant husband Jiggs to a doctor, whose examination quickly exposes him as a fraud: when threatened with an X-ray, he hastily shoves hidden bottles into his coat. George McManus's strip, launched in 1913, built its comedy on class anxiety — the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant wife versus her pub-loving husband — rendered in McManus's fluid, art-nouveau-inflected line, rounded figures, and tightly choreographed panel-to-panel action. Speech balloons carry all narrative weight; no captions intervene. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their recurring cast, sequential grammar, and page-wide storytelling taught readers — and future artists — exactly how to read pictures in sequence.