Bringing Up Father

Six panels follow Jiggs and a well-dressed companion through a bar exchange. A case of mineral water arrives as a gift from Dinty Moore; Jiggs, asked to pass it to his pastor, reveals he had relabeled champagne as water to deceive his wife — and now the ruse has rebounded on him. The strip's visual grammar is already fluent: uniform rectangular panels, speech balloons with clear attribution, expressive silhouette-style figures, and a punchline built across distributed beats. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and it ran for decades as one of the most widely syndicated strips in American newspapers. Those daily and Sunday pages — trading in recurring characters, sequential panels, and balloon dialogue — were precisely the format that printers would later bind into pamphlets: the direct origin of the comic book.