Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs — the newly-rich Irish-American social climber — on a mountain walk with a stout companion. The gag builds cleanly: the pair marvel at a cliff drop of ten thousand feet, one asks whether people fall often, and the other deadpans, "Only once." McManus draws in a confident Art Nouveau line, patterned costumes filling flat silhouettes, figures leaning into motion against spare backgrounds. *Bringing Up Father*, launched by George McManus in 1913, ran for decades in syndication and became one of the first strips collected into book form — those reprint volumes are the direct ancestors of the comic book. McManus helped fix the visual grammar still in use: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast whose faces read instantly across a crowded page.