Bringing Up Father

A six-panel daily strip by George McManus follows Jiggs—newly rich Irish-American social climber in white tie—through a sidewalk confrontation. A woman asks him the time; a stranger shoves past; Jiggs demands satisfaction; the stranger warns that fighting is the custom in *his* country; Jiggs replies, pointedly, "But this is not my country"—and bolts. McManus's line is fluid and assured: round-bodied figures, decorative crosshatching, speech balloons shaped to the speaker's temper. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and was among the first strips translated into foreign languages. Newspaper dailies and Sunday pages like this one established the visual conventions—sequential panels, integrated dialogue, recurring cast—that migrated directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.