Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Maggie's elaborate scheme to surprise her husband Jiggs on their wedding anniversary: she smuggles costumed guests into the next room, then asks Jiggs if he knows the date — he guesses Monday, prompting her exasperated reminder that he once sat contentedly in the kitchen eating corned beef and cabbage. McManus draws both characters in crisp silhouette-friendly outlines, Maggie towering in Grecian costume, Jiggs squat in top hat and spats. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly ninety years, making it one of newspaper syndication's longest daily strips. Its domestic comedy of social-climbing wife versus working-class husband helped standardize the recurring-character daily strip — the engine that would, by the 1930s, be reprinted in pamphlet form and become the comic book.