Bringing Up Father

Six panels track a domestic spat between Jiggs and Maggie, the strip's central couple: Jiggs asks for a joke, Maggie turns it into a rebuke, and the exchange escalates until Maggie drives him off with a volley of verbal humiliation and what appears to be a thrown object, leaving Jiggs fleeing in a panic. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable — ornate crosshatched costumes, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons that carry the strip's entire comedic engine. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips reprinted in collected pamphlet form, a direct ancestor of the comic book format. McManus helped standardize the multi-panel daily strip's visual grammar: consistent characters, sequential cause-and-effect gags, and balloon placement guiding the eye left to right across the page.