Bringing Up Father

Four panels track a classic McManus situation: Maggie locks up Jiggs's clothes to keep him home, but the irrepressible husband telephones a doctor feigning illness, then clubs the arriving physician with a mallet before absconding with the man's bag and coat. The final panel shows Jiggs promising to return the clothes — having outwitted his wife through cheerful fraud. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running domestic comedy strips in American newspaper history. McManus refined the visual conventions — symmetrical panel composition, elaborate Art Nouveau interior detail, expressive balloon lettering — that daily strips were then codifying into the grammar later inherited wholesale by the comic book format.