Bringing Up Father

Four black-and-white panels show Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American bricklayer turned millionaire, lying sick in bed while his imperious wife Maggie looms over him. When he threatens to box her ears she retorts that if he died she would never find another wife to look after her as she has — a neat comic reversal. Maggie then bellows COME HERE! at someone off-panel as Jiggs slinks toward the door. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, syndicated by King Features. His clean Art Nouveau line, expressive silhouettes, and tightly choreographed panel-to-panel staging helped codify the visual grammar — recurring characters, escalating domestic confrontation, punchline final panel — that newspaper dailies passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.