Bringing Up Father — 1916-12-11

Four panels follow Jiggs, the new-money Irish-American bricklayer, holding court in an armchair and insisting that William Jennings Bryan first ran for president in 1882. His companion corrects him — Bryan's first run was 1896 — and Jiggs stubbornly reverses the facts with each rebuttal until a hurled object sends him sprawling. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, developing the strip's signature vocabulary: brushy crosshatching, expressive silhouettes, and escalating domestic chaos resolved by slapstick. Newspaper dailies like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book; their recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel grammar were simply repackaged into anthology pamphlets by the mid-1930s. McManus's draftsmanship influenced virtually every cartoonist who followed.