Bringing Up Father

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the newly wealthy Irish-American social climber, as he schemes to escape domestic supervision. A woman phones Biffany's jewelry store posing as a customer—labeled "covered"—while Jiggs lounges obliviously nearby. He then asks his sharp-tongued wife Maggie permission to go out; she grants it, unaware he's already arranged his alibi. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, his art distinguished by bold ink outlines, spotted black-on-white patterning, and figures whose body language carries the joke as much as the dialogue. Strips like this one—syndicated to hundreds of papers simultaneously—established the daily comic as mass storytelling, its recurring cast and panel-by-panel rhythm directly seeding the anthology comic books that followed two decades later.