Bringing Up Father

Six panels follow Jiggs and a musician trading jokes about a cello mistaken for a gondola. Asked what he'd like to hear, Jiggs requests something played *that* high — pointing skyward — then, after the cellist performs with comic abandon (notes flying, bow arcing), asks whether he could play like Mr. Jiggs. Punchline: "I don't know — I never tried!" McManus draws in a clean, fluid line with expressive caricature faces, slapstick motion blur, and speech balloons already fully integrated into the panel grid. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first daily strips to build a recurring cast and sustained comic situation — the Irish immigrant Jiggs forever caught between working-class pleasures and his socially ambitious wife Maggie — helping codify the visual conventions that newspaper syndicates would soon repackage as comic books.