Bringing Up Father

Four daily panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American who would rather haunt Dinty Moore's than keep up appearances. Here a caller named Jones is told by a servant that Mr. Jiggs is out; when Jiggs materializes anyway and insults Jones's manners, Jones literally kicks him over a desk in the final panel — Jiggs flies through the air, shoes aloft, landing in a heap. McManus's line is clean and theatrical, his characters rubbery and expressive, his speech balloons spare. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated worldwide. It exemplifies how the newspaper daily strip — not the anthology reprint — first forged the recurring cast, the panel-to-panel gag rhythm, and the visual conventions that later migrated wholesale into the comic book format.